Aussiechick - surely you're not suggesting that Santa solicits money from people through an aggressive direct marketing strategy, rather than simply distributing gifts out of the goodness of his heart?!

I hope his lawyers aren't reading this. They *could* be, you know. They could be doing part-time PhDs on 'The Provision of Goods and Services by Imaginary Magical Persons: a New Perspective on Corporate Liability'.

(Speaking of imaginary magical persons - Harry Potter this Sunday!)

Back when I was a valuable member of society working in the marketing department of a major corporation, I used to sit behind a desk eight hours a day, writing letters from a man who didn't exist to millions of people I'd never met, in an attempt to persuade them to spend money they didn't have on things they didn't want, thus lining the pockets of yet more people I'd never met.

If that's considered 'normal' and a fruitful use of one's time, I'm not sure how I'd go about assessing the relative 'weirdness' of my my PhD topic (in philosophy of mind) now I'm a worthless sponger using taxpayers' money to indulge my appetitite for airy-fairy pontificating. I certainly *hope* it's weird.

What an arse. Don't blame yourself. No doubt the game he was playing was: 'I'll let her go on thinking we're together, but I won't actually say so - that way I get everything I want while it lasts, and when it goes wrong it's all her fault for misunderstanding'. But even the most self-deluded prick must have known he was actively misleading you if he actually used to talk about having kids together etc.

Anyway, I suspect the best advice is to do what everyone always tells you you shouldn't: bottle it up. For now, at least. You've got ambitions of your own that don't revolve around this idiot: focus on those. You can be all the more proud of your achievement for having overcome this obstacle, and there'll be plenty of time later to dwell on what went wrong and all the rest of it.

Hi Jade

My subject area's philosophy - hence Health Care Ethics popping into my mind I guess.

No stats to worry about for us chin-stroking philosopher types - it's airy-fairy pontificating all the way! (Well, maybe not, but I don't think what we do could be described as 'quantitative'. The closest I get to maths is the occasional bit of formal logic in a paper I need to get my head around.)

Don't forget a lot of people on this forum are doing lab-based science PhDs. I don't know exactly how arts PhDs compare (I haven't started mine yet) - I'm sure there would still be lot of demands on your time (lots of reading etc.), but not the same sort of requirement to be in Uni most days for instance.

Also don't forget there's the part time option.

And finally, assuming you find time to write anyway, it might be worth considering whether that writing could be part of a PhD project - meaning not every hour spent on the PhD would be 'extra' time you'd have to find.

Not my area, but I'd guess statistics are going to be a biggish part of any science degree at that level. So whether you formally need a GCSE or not I would think you'd have to be reasonably confident in maths.

I don't know your subject area, but maybe you should be asking yourself if there are directions you could go that are less science-based (and hence less maths/stats based) - e.g. Health Care Ethics?

I'd just like to second Sneaks on this - it most probably is a good time to buy. I know there's always a theoretical risk prices will fall further, but all the signs are that they've hit bottom.

We bought our first house in 1998, just as prices were starting to climb after the last property price crash, and I'm so glad we did. Getting that foot on the ladder while houses were affordable enabled us to move on to bigger and better houses as our family grew, and we managed to make enough money on the sale of our last house (in quite an expensive area) to buy a bigger, cheaper place across town and do loads of work on it. Now our four kids all have their own bedrooms for the first time ever - luxury!

This isn't supposed to be one of those gloating 'look how much money we've made/how big our house is' stories - but the fact is, if we hadn't bought when we did, on our income we would be living in a poky 3-bed rented house today rather than in a big 5-bed house we own a good chunk of (say 100k's worth - our mortgage is 90k). We couldn't come close to buying a family home at today's prices.

That's why I drew attention to the possibility of buying a share in a house, I guess - at least it would be a way of getting on that ladder. But I suppose prices are really not likely to boom over the next few years in the way they did in the years after we first bought, so there's probably no reason to get too anxious about buying rather than renting right now... like I say, I guess the crucial thing is to invest that 50k wisely somewhere, even if no-one will yet let you put it into bricks and mortar.

It might be worth thinking about doing a PhD part time, not just because it would fit round full-time work better but also because it would let you spread the cost of fees - you'd have to find £1600ish a year instead of £3200ish.

I just Googled 'screenwriting PhD' and some interesting stuff turned up. Looks like a 'practice-based' PhD that includes writing a screenplay (alongside research) might be an option. Some interesting screenwriting-related projects here, for instance:

http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/10601.htm

I doubt you'll find a ready-made project to hop on to - I think you'll need to come up with a project and take it to potential supervisors. Whether in film departments, creative writing departments etc. I don't know... could your MA supervisor maybe point you in the right direction?

Do you need her approval for this? I know it would be nice to have it, I know this sort of criticism is the last thing you need at this stage, but really this is now between you and the journal, isn't it?

At the end of the day, you can't please all of the people all of the time. Do the work the journal's reviewers have asked you to do on this paper right now, do the work your supervisor asks you to do on your thesis prior to submission, and do the work the examiners ask you to do on your thesis after your viva.

As you suggest, time is of the essence here. If this revised paper would be accepted for publication just as it stands, right now, there's a very strong case for just ignoring your supervisor's comments, sending it off, and turning your attention to your thesis.

(Maybe you could suggest to your supervisor that you've got your wires crossed - you were just showing her the finished version, not looking for a second critique?)

I do think it might be worth having a conversation with your supervisor about this, though. You're justifiably surprised by the number of comments she's made on this paper at this (very!) late stage, and hence understandably worried that dozens of comments are going to start appearing on your thesis similarly late in the day, and I think it's probably worth making her aware of this and hopefully clearing the air.

If the object of the exercise is just to get on the property ladder, I wonder if it might be worth looking into the possibility of buying a 50% or 75% share of a house, via a housing association or some such? (I don't know the details of these schemes, but I know they exist.) That 65k mortgage you mention, plus your 50k deposit, might just be enough for those purposes.

Or there are more off-the-beaten-track options - you could probably pick up a very nice liveaboard canal boat for 50k, for instance!

Otherwise I suppose it's a question of putting that 50k to the best possible use (investment-wise) so you're in a strong position at such time as you do have 'proper' jobs.

I know none of these options is any substitute for the freedom to buy a proper house of your choice and within your means, though. You're right, it seems a ludicrous situation.

That's a good sign on the 'subject knowledge' side (although I think you're now not going to be working in that area anyway?), but when it comes to getting a place on a PhD program, people are going to want to see evidence of strong research skills in particular.

What stage are you at in your MSc now? Are you still doing a research-project? If you could do anything right now to ensure that you get a really solid mark for a substantial research-based piece of work, you might yet swing it.

At roughly this stage last year, I had the first draft of a dissertation of round about a 66% standard, but with some focused advice from my supervisor on what I needed to do to do demonstrate research skills in particular, I managed to get the final draft up to 74%. And it wasn't *that* hard to do - it was largely a question of knowing what boxes I needed to tick. So maybe it would be easier than you think to pull your mark up substantially from where you are at the minute.

I don't want to sound like an enormous snob, but if it's honest advice you want - I think you should really ask yourself if you're cut out for a PhD. You've done two degrees already and not managed to get over the 60% threshold; now, even with the benefit of the training and experience you got during your first MSc, it sounds like you're not expecting to do any better in your second.

Obviously I don't know your personal circumstances, and maybe you have good reason to think you'd do substantially better on a third MSc, but I think you need to be realistic. The standard of work that would be of expected of you as a PhD student is, to put it bluntly, a lot higher than anything you've produced so far; you need to ask yourself whether you can get from where you are now to where you'd have to be in a couple of years' time to succeed on a PhD (i.e. to the stage where you have the professional research skills and in-depth knowledge of your field needed to produce work that merits publication).

Maybe my perspective's just skewed because, coming from an arts & humanities MA, I've had it drilled into me that even a good distinction (70%+) might not be good enough to get a funded PhD place. I know the sciences aren't supposed to be so competitive.

Don't panic; I would think anyone who was going to rip you off would have done it by now. Nobody steals your bank details then waits a day before they use them - they use them immediately, before you realise there's any threat.

Plus unless you have enough money in the bank for this guy to retire to Rio, he'd be pretty stupid to do anything criminal - the police would hardly have a 'whodunnit' on their hands!

Translation services seem to cost around £30 an hour or maybe 7p a word, so you're talking about thousands of pounds for a 200 page (60000ish word?) document. I don't know if the person you mention is a professional translator - if so, no doubt it would be reasonable to pay him a bit less, but you'd have to trade off the saving against the accuracy/credibility of the translation. I don't know, but it seems to me that if someone challenged some conclusion you'd drawn on the basis of this document, you'd need to be able to defend the reliability of the translation.

Maybe you could ring round for the cheapest quote from a professional service, then either take them up on it or go back to this person you mention and suggest that you'll pay him, say, 30% less?

Have I just slipped through some sort of timewarp, or are educated people in the UK, in 2009 really queueing up to tell a woman (who's recently suffered a miscarriage, let's not forget) that daring to reproduce at the time of her choosing demonstrates a 'lack of commitment' to her PhD?

The really depressing thing is that the people making these comments are likely one day to be in positions of authority themselves, rolling their eyes at women who dare to get pregnant, ask to work flexible hours, expect to be considered for promotion after returning from maternity leave etc., and piling pressure on them to 'show their commitment' by working till their health starts to suffer.

Thank goodness the law is against them.