the amount of time you will be expected to actually be in uni varies from subject to subject, but if you are in the sciences then they will pretty much expect you to be there every day (in my experience anyway) and obviously if you have any lab work to do then you will need to be there anyway. i could probably fit in a part time job around my phd at the moment (i am just finishing my first year) but only if it was in the evenings, as i am far too busy during the day. consultancy work may be possible occasionally but i don't know if you'd be able to rely on it as a regular source of income as i just don't think you could dedicate much time to it.

as for money, it depends on who is funding the phd. i am funded by the BBSRC and the stipend is £12,940 per year (tax free, and you get more if you study in london). i am very lucky in that i get a 'top-up' from an industrial sponsor taking me up to around £16,500, and i have never heard of anyone getting much more than this. if i were to pay tax, this is the equivalent of a salary of about £21,900, so is plenty for me to live on but not that high compared to many people's salaries. if you have family/kids to support then it would be pretty hard to live on £12,940 (equivalent to around £17,250 as a 'normal' salary) a year i would imagine!

sorry to sound so negative, i am not trying to put you off! if you still feel you can afford to do it, and it is what you really want to do, then i say go for it! you could probably contact the uni in question and ask how much the stipend is before you apply. if you know which research council is funding it, then you could look on their website to find out.

thankyou! xx and congrats again xx

maybe the bf in the USA cheated on her or something happened to him...
maybe she decided she was committed to the wrong person after all...
maybe she has changed and no longer holds the same values...
maybe it's none of your business what she gets up to....
maybe you ought to stop mooning after the poor girl and get a life of your own?! it's 2 years since you first posted, get over it and move on.

Hi everyone,

I have my upgrade viva tomorrow, and basically I am having a panic! I submitted my upgrade report (~12000 words) just over a week ago, and the feedback has been pretty good in terms of the level and style of my writing, structure, content etc. However, my supervisors seem to have a pretty laid back attitude to bureaucracy, and basically think the whole procedure is a waste of my time when i could be getting on with my 'real' PhD work.

That's all well and good, and they have already told me I will be continuing to my second year, but I am now having a mini panic about the viva tomorrow. Obviously my supervisors will not be there, and it has suddenly hit me that the person doing my viva will probably take it more seriously than my supervisors do!

So, basically I am asking - how much of a big deal is this viva?! How long should I expect it to last? I do know my work inside out, so hopefully it shouldn't be too much of a disaster, but I think my supervisors may have lulled me into a false sense of security and maybe I should have done a bit more preparation.....!

Thanks x

well done, great news (i'm ignoring the tiny bit of not so good news...!) ;-)

hopefully this will be me tomorrow, i have my upgrade viva at 10am....

celebrities are of interest to people because they lead 'glamorous' lives (or at least it looks that way) and provide a bit of escapism. i, on the other hand, lead a really boring, dull life, most of it spent staring at a computer screen or repeating endless seemingly pointless experiments in the lab. who he heck would want to watch/read about that?! i will gain recognition in my field through hard work, getting things published, and that will be enough for me. I am presenting my first poster at a conference next week, and the thought that someone might actually want to read what I have to say is pretty exciting, as it's never happened before! so i guess in some ways I understand the 'recognition' you seem to crave. however, i would never expect anyone outside of my field to understand or care about what I do, mostly beause it's so specialised and would take a good hour to explain in layman's terms. and to be honest, that is kind of what i like about my work too. i love that when i go home and my bf asks how my day was, he doesn't really care what i actually did, and his eyes glaze over if i try and explain! yes, i am never going to cure cancer/cure AIDS/bring world peace, but i am making a small (ok, tiny!) but important contribution to the advancement of science, and that will do for me!

as for being supportive, i think everyone is simply saying that they don't feel the way that you do, and that is not being unsupportive, that is being honest. we could all blindly agree with you and say how terrible, you're ancient at 23, your life is over... would that make you feel better? we are mostly pointing out that there is no need to feel as you do and i think that is being pretty supportive actually!

ps. i'm a 26 year old first year phd student - i must be nearly ready for the scrapheap!

the whole point of writing essays etc during your course is so that you do the research and find out the answers YOURSELF. if you don't do this work, this means you are not learning anything as you progress through the course. i only hope that the kind of people who do this sort of thing get tripped up further along the line, eg. they are sat in an exam and a question comes up related to the essay that they couldn't be bothered to write. it astounds me that people can do this, not only because you are cheating the system, but also because you are cheating yourself. i couldn't live with the fact that i had handed in someone else's work and claimed it as my own, and i would be in constant fear of someone finding me out (whether that be a lecturer, friend on the same course, or parents etc). i would be too ashamed. i would rather hand in an essay i knew was absolutely terrible but that i had written myself, rather than cheat and hand in another person's work. i worked damn hard for my 2:1 at undergrad and even harder for my distinction at masters, and the thought that in the future i might lose out on my dream job to someone who cheated their way to it makes me sick to the stomach. i understand people can get desperate sometimes when under pressure, but i don't believe that they can ever justify cheating, and as other people have mentioned there are always other options available to you. i can only hope that the people who pay for their work to be done by someone else get found out and thrown off their course, for it will be no less than they deserve.

when i got my lit review back from my supervisor it was basically all red as he had rewritten practically all of it. i didn't feel that most of the changes were actually necessary (v minute changes to writing style so it just didn't sound like 'me' anymore), so to be honest i just ignored the vast majority of it! i only accepted changes where i felt it genuinely made the document flow better, or where he had added in words that sounded better etc. at the end of the day, it is YOUR work and not your supervisors, so you should be free to choose which changes to take on board. at first i found it really disheartening to see my work come back covered in red, but now i find it really helpful in analysing my own work and thinking through which sentence structure works best, which parts sound most 'scientific', etc. i also find it helpful to analyse my supervisor's writing, as it is far from perfect at times (in my opinion anyway!) and i can see where he writes badly/well and incorporate the good elements of his style into my work. i spend a long time going through the corrections he has made and making myself really think about why he thinks it needed improving, rather than just clicking 'accept all' and not reading through it!

in which case i happily stand corrected :-)

i currently have four supervisors, and god knows who is supposed to be 1st, 2nd or whatever!! if i were you i wouldn't be too concerned, i think it can really help to bounce ideas off more than one person, and they may bring a new perspective or angle that you hadn't previously thought of. they can also be thought of as backup if you have problems with your '1st' supervisor, or if they are away for long periods etc.

don't worry about it too much, i hated having so many people involved to start with but it has actually worked out quite well so far as they all bring something different, eg. one is really good and pretty fast at giving feedback on my written work, another is useful for academic contacts etc. as mentioned in other posts, just try to keep them both in the loop, cc them in on emails and so on, so they are kept up to date with your project.

as for qualifications, i wouldn't think it matters too much, as long as he is not your main supervisor then i see no harm in him being involved. after all, they are only there to 'supervise', you don't have to actually pay any attention to them ;-)

Hi, i got a 2:1 in my undergrad followed by a distinction at masters level and here i am on a fully funded phd!! so a 2:1 is definitely not the end of the world, especially if it is followed up by a strong masters. as for funding, obviously a 1st + distinction would be ideal, but i am proof that this doesn't have to be the case! as for a future career, if you were to go on and complete a phd no-one would care what you got at undergrad level. the only times a first would really help your chances would be if you wanted to do a phd at oxbridge, or if you didn't have a masters qualification (in my experience!). good luck (up)

thanks everyone for your replies!

supergenius - i hadn't even considered the fact that people could view the rest of the excel file, so thanks for the tip! i would hate for my supervisor to see my raw data files as they're such a mess! and you're right, i need to get on and learn how to use something a little more advanced, excel is definitely limiting me!

first of all - DON'T PANIC! it is perfectly normal to feel like a fraud after handing a piece of work in, especially one to which you have dedicated so much time. stop re-reading it - it will only make you feel worse! now it is submitted, you should give yourself a bit of time away from your thesis, and come back to it with fresh eyes when you begin your viva preparation. you should congratulate yourself for getting the thing done, and give yourself a break!

secondly, regarding the plagiarism issue - DON'T PANIC! everyone ends up using very small sentences/parts of sentences that are very similar if not the same as other people's work. it boils down to the fact that there are only so many ways to say something, so you are bound to end up 'copying' someone else at some point! as long as these are only tiny parts of your intro, and are referenced, then this will not be an issue. the examiners will understand that it is impossible to paraphrase absolutely everything. our uni puts the electronic version of a thesis through a computer program that picks up plagiarism - it compares the work to all sources of papers, books, previous theses etc, and comes up with a percentage score of copied work. they expect a small percentage of your thesis to be a match to other work as this cannot always be avoided, and of course may have occured by chance.

so unless you have literally copied and pasted huge chunks of your thesis (which it sounds like you haven't!) then you have nothing to worry about, and you are certainly not a fraud. my advice is not to be so hard on yourself, and good luck with your viva (up)

Hi everyone,

I am writing my 1st year report and need some help with my graphs! In the past what I have done is made a graph in Excel and pasted it into Word. Job done. However, this report is so big that Word is complaining as my graphs are too huge! So I have started copying the Excel graphs into Paint, saving them as jpegs, and then putting the jpeg into Word instead.

So I was just wondering, is this the most efficient way of doing things? Or is there a much cleverer/faster way of doing it?

Thanks

Smoobles :-)

i should add that i guess that puts me squarely in the pop category!!