It depends on the situation.. Sometimes being a 'student' has its perks! The grad school where I am likes to call phd students Postgraduate Researchers.

Why not look for jobs that interest you and then see whether they require you to have a masters degree or not.

I don't think it makes any difference as long as you pass i guess. Besides a masters is always necessary to do a PhD anyway, usually a 2.1 or higher at undergrad is all that is required from the funding bodies.

I think that a panel is a good thing. Where I am a student you have to appoint your panel in the first few weeks of starting. I have 5 people on my panel.. 2 from my lab, 2 from my CASE sponsors and then another guy from industry who my CASE sponsors wanted to be involved, he just happened to be in the year above me during my undergrad which was a bit random.

Basically it means you get a wider range of expertise and experience at your fingertips which means greater input into your work.

Also one thing that I have found in having a panel is that when I have meetings with them all and present my work, it gets me used to answering a broader set of questions. The industrial guys aren't overly familar with the lab techniques I use so question me about them, which gets me used to explaining the things that I just take for granted.

Thirdly, I can appreciate why your supervisor got a bit annoyed with you Jouri for putting his name down when he hadn't even seen the paper; I wouldn't want my name on a paper that I hadn't read. However, I can understand why you wanted to include him as I understand it is 'the done' thing to have your supervisor as a co-author, but you should have run it by him first really.

Procrastinator I think its a bit tenuous to compare a PhD student adding her supervisor as a co-author with a guy who added his toddler. I doubt the toddler would have given his dad guidance and advice throughout the PhD process like a supervisor does!

Well firstly confused, I dont think you 'betrayed' your supervisor as such.. But it was a bit out of order to appoint a co-supervisor without his say so, in my opinion he should have had the final say as to who was to join him as your supervisors.

Secondly I thought i t was perfectly normal to have more than one supervisor. I have 3 supervisors and 2 advisors, each with different backgrounds and experience, so it works well.

Well if you are on the fence then you must have some ideas? Choose one of them.

Yeah it really annoys me that these companies make such huge profits then somehow manage to make out that they are victims so that they 'need' to increase prices. Of course all businesses want to make a profit, but there is profit and then there is greed. Electricity and gas are things that we all need/use and in my opinion they just take advantage of that fact as they know that if they increase prices by 5% we just have to grin and bear it.

Well you have just as good pospects in either to be honest.. Cancer research is a huge area and continually advancing, and cancer is on the increase so there should be jobs out there. Then proteomics is like all the -omics technologies out there, they are advancing and being adapted to lots of different areas of research and so again there will be jobs out there.

Why not combine the two?

I know my family don't have a clue about what I really do, I tried explaining once but it didn't really work. They just know that I work in a lab and do something with chickens and bacteria; that suits me.

I do get really annoyed when I tell outsiders that I am a phd student and then they refer to me being at 'school' or being a 'student dosser' or that I couldn't cope being in the real world. Truth be told I do more work now then when I had a 'proper job in the real world'.

Well surely if you want to work in cancer research then there must be a particular area within that field that you are interested in and therefore want to work in. So that would be a good place to start coming up with ideas for a project, get on to google and do a bit of research into what sorts of things are currently being done in your preferred area.

Oo on a related theme, do any of you remember those 'teas maid' things you used to get, were basically an alarm clock that you set to wake you and boil an incorporated kettle to make you a cup of tea to wake up to.. I remember my mum used to have one when I was a kid.

Well the best advice I could give from experience is to make sure your slides aren't a)too busy as people will get lost or b) too wordy as chances are people wont read the whole slide and get bored.

Keep your points brief and to the point.. just use them as visual prompts for yourself to then expand on when you are talking.

Also if possible have a practice with your slides on a big screen/projector before your meeting as text and colours generally will always look different than how they look on your computer monitor.

My most common one is thinking 'Oh I will just go and get such and such from my room' then when I get there and can't remember what it is I am looking for.