Sent :-)

Hi Satchi, I can send it to you if you let me have your email address.

Someone should contact UCU - the lecturers' union. This is clearly a lecturer post (teaching, research, supervising research) so the local branch should be campaigning to get it recognised as such and the national union could publicise this shocking practice and campaign to stop it at Salford and elsewhere.

Sent :-)

Sent :-)

Hi Rina,

I think I can get the last one. Is it 'The family stress process' by McCubbin and Patterson (1983)? I have your email address because I sent you another article a while ago, so if this is the right article, I can email it to you. I couldn't get the others.

Hi Incognito, sorry you are having such a hard time. I'm not great at dealing with stress but I find swimming helps a lot - I think because it forces me to breathe very deeply. I swam every day during my final undergrad year when I was stressed about the dissertation, exams etc. These days I can only manage twice a week but it definitely helps calm me down. Yoga is also good for the same reason - the breathing. I'm sure I had fewer stress related health problems when I was doing yoga regularly. Good luck with the orthodontist.

I would also be interested in how long people have taken to do revisions after completing the first draft. I guess it depends on how good the first draft is. My absolute final deadline is September 2015. I would like to submit earlier than that though but when I told friends that I was aiming to get my first draft finished by the end of December this year, they said I should try to get it done earlier than that to allow enough time for all the revisions etc.

Hi Sunnychicka16,

Sorry you're having such a hard time. This is just a suggestion but if your uni offers any kind of one to one academic writing support for international students, maybe you should book a tutorial with them. If the research director made a judgement about your work after reading just one paragraph, it could be because there are problems with your writing style. If you are lucky and get a good writing tutor you might get some great advice on how to improve your style and how to tackle writing a lot very quickly. At the uni where I work, a student in crisis like you could probably get one tutorial appointment a week for three or four weeks to help them sort themselves out.

I would also go to the SU and see what advice they can give you about getting an extension. From what you've said above about the amount of work you've done so far, I think submitting your thesis just one month from now is a very risky strategy. You might get revise and resubmit but the alternatives are outright fail and resubmit for MPhil.

Good luck.

Hi Bevcha,

So sorry to hear about your horrible experience. Please don't blame yourself. You were just unlucky. Be kind to yourself and tell people around you so they can be kind to you.

A. xx

I did a google search on this today after receiving an invite from the Journal of Business and Social Sciences (or something like that). It seems to be quite a common scam. I used to get ones where the email address to reply to was a hotmail or yahoo account, but those seem to have stopped.

Hi Satchi,

I think if it were me I would stress my interest in the job and explain in my application letter that I couldn't make the interview date and why. I would then give a range of other times when I could attend or offer to do a Skype interview. If you wait for them to offer you an interview and then say 'sorry I can't come on that date' it makes you look either a bit dishonest or a bit disorganised. If they put the date in the job details they expect applicants to be free on that day. Of course I understand that if you tell them in advance, they may just bin your application and you would never know whether they might have been interested. It's a real dilemma.

Good luck!

As someone with a full time job and a part time PhD who has just spent the entire bank holiday weekend slaving over a keyboard in a stuffy dark room, I have to say there must be easier and possibly cheaper ways to indulge a passion for archaeology than committing to 7 years of having almost no life outside work and study. I loved my MA but I've found the PhD to be a very different beast. I have enjoyed it at times but if I didn't need it for my career I would've given up long ago. I know one person who started a PhD purely for interest after he was made redundant so he had plenty of time and no real money worries but he found it too stressful and dropped it.

Well done for taking this step and good luck with the change. Requesting a change in your supervisory arrangements can be very stressful but hopefully you will be much happier in the end.

Hi emaa,

I can send it if you let me have your email address.