It reminds me of the songs from The Mighty Boosh!

Also "ALICE looks at the collisions of lead ions" is my new fb status!

@PhdBug. You applied to seven unis for PhD? I'm just boggling at the dedication involved in filling out all those bloody forms...

@Dancingintherain. Definitely lean on the side of 'just interested'. Show where your proposal has come from out of your previous research, but you look a bit creepy if you start your email with "Since the age of five, standing on Hadrian's Wall, I knew I would be an archeologist..." There's a difference, too, between expressing your interest in the subject by showing an awareness of the context for your proposal and recent developments in your field, and just saying how much you love paleography and or are excited by PCR or something.

1-2 hours of contact time a week is a LOT. I never saw my supervisor for my master's (ever: funtimes!), and I see my PhD supervisor every three weeks or so for an hour or two.

The picking apart your work: I think you have to ask yourself whether he's usually right or not. If he's improving your work, then stick with him, even if he's not sugar-coating it for you.

Finally, the issue with him not giving him you specific guidance (which seems like the biggy). Have you asked him for this kind of help in person? You can frame it as, "So, after our talk last week I went away and searched the literature. I've read these three papers; is there anything further on the topic that you would recommend to help me solve problem x?" That way it doesn't look like you're trying to get him to research for you, you're just looking for his input, and you've made it clear you're already doing the work for yourself. I'd definitely try asking him before writing him off as a supervisor based on what other people have said about his teaching style. My own supervisor has never given me that kind of specific, detailed research advice but, from other people I know, it can be really, really counter-productive: wasting a bit of time and making your own mistakes is part of the process, and you learn so much more in the long run.

What do you mean when you say he's not approachable? Is he hard to contact? Because that is the biggest alarm bell for me in a supervisor, much more than making you research things from scratch and being very critical!

Good luck with it! It'll save you so much money. One of my friends put her fag money in a jar from day one of quitting, and said that if she smoked again she'd have to give it to charity, but if she went six months without she'd spend it on some stupid shoes. She did get to buy the stupid shoes, but I think she's smoked a few since then, so not a 100% end to it.

Overeducated: I always get id-ed, and I've been mistaken for being under 16 in the recent past (I'm 25). Also, in my first year of teaching, I was sitting in on lectures, and the students would try to do the freshers-getting-to-know-each-other small talk: so difficult to stop them before they say anything embarrassing and let them know I was going to be their tutor! Generally, I don't worry about it too much now, because this i my third year of teaching, and I always make sure to introduce myself as the class tutor.

Knitwear all the way! I've lost weight recently (stress-busting gym sessions...) so my trousers are baggy, but my modern casual knitwear is still in the game!

I lived in London for a year while I did my masters at UCL, now I'm doing my PhD in the North East.

London is expensive (I pay basically half the rent now that I would in London, and my transport costs are zero). However, I'd definitely not say people are friendlier up north (no idea where that comes from at all, and it does annoy me a bit!). I lived in Archway, where I could get fantastic cheap food from my local grocery, which was run by a big Greek-Cypriot family, and there were a lot of community events going on, as well as loads of things to do (often free) in the city itself. I had AHRC funding with a London weighting, and I had money left over at the end of the year (although I'm not a big party animal!).

If you've lived in a bigger city before, then London doesn't really feel any different, it's just there's more to do. I'd love to move back there if I could afford it.

It's not that my housemate's noisy at all: he's very considerate, but my bedroom is right next to the bathroom and to the boiler that heats the hot water, so I hear the water when it comes on, the extractor fan, the toilet flushing etc etc :-D I am intimately acquainted with all my housemates' bathroom habits. My previous housemate was a night-owl, and I'd get woken up at 2am when he came home from a night out: there's no pleasing me, really!

Also lol@ bonzo's stereo suggestion. I'm really poor, though; I don't even have a stereo! I'm gettiing an awful lot of reading done without my laptop.

Going from my experience of giving reading lists to my undergrads, I'd say they'd expect you to read maybe one or two from the top section (they look like background, big-sweep stuff) and then whatever interests you from the bottom three (sounding a bit Countdown there!). If it was me (and bear in mind I am pretty slapdash and always short on time) I'd read the articles and edited collections first from the bottom sections because you get a wider range of info for your time investment. They'd probably think you were going overboard if you'd read everything on that list.

Thanks for the lovely replies guys! The inspection copies advice was brilliant, and I'm going to see if I can do this. I went to Waterstones yesterday and got £50 worth of books for £30 with some vouchers I had, but I've still got a few more books I need, so I'll see if I can get them from OUP!

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and get the laptop on a credit card. I've managed so far with no personal debt, but this is making everything so complicated at the moment, and it'll mean I have more money in the long run if I can go back to work.

I've been trying to be more positive about the early mornings. I'm a reasonably early riser anyway, and I like to go to the gym first thing, so it wouldn't be so bad if I could just train myself to go to sleep at 10pm! With your earplugs, do you guys ever have trouble hearing your alarm clock? I think I'd be really paranoid about that and the smoke alarm!

I'm feeling much happier today: I ran 5k this morning listening to 90's hits in the gym, made some bread yesterday and had peanut butter toast for breakfast, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to finish a chapter off today. Also, it's sunny! Thanks again everyone, much love.

My laptop died two weeks ago. I have no money to replace it and it can't be fixed. My department has three computers, shared between all the taught and research pgs. I have four months until I want to hand in.

I was planning to go back to work, but if I have to use the uni computers I won't be able to work at the weekend or at night until term starts, so I can't even go back to my part-time job and work at the same time like I've been doing for my PhD so far.

I've just got a new housemate who has to get up for work at 5am every morning, so I've been getting a maximum of six hours sleep. This isn't helping my normally sunny disposition.

I'm teaching a new class this year and I can't even afford the primary texts, let alone have time to reread them all.

I just want to cry. I need to hug a kitten. What do you do when you're miserable?

I'm about to finish my PhD and I'm 25. Is 31 the average internationally or in the UK? Most people I know are younger than that (although I'm probably at the younger end of the spectrum). I haven't really thought about having kids: definitely won't for at least the next five years. I know of people who've had babies before, during, and after, and it all worked out fine!

I've worked between 15 and 20 hours a week in my part-time job for most of my PhD, and I've done teaching and exam marking and stuff on top of that (teaching and preparation took maybe an afternoon a week averaged over the year). I've given up work over the summer now while I finish writing up, and I'm hoping to be finished by Christmas (so that'll be three years and a term). It's do-able, but don't expect to have a spectacular social life! I don't think my thesis has suffered, but there's extra things in the dept which I haven't been able to do that would have looked good on my cv, but I just don't have time for.

I was also lucky that I had a relatively stress-free, often quiet, and well-paid job, so I sometimes got £8 an hour for a ten hour shift, of which six hours were spent reading. Sadly, my job has changed now, which is one reason I've quit for a few months!

I may have been overenthusiastic with my clicky finger :$ It gets stuck when I hit post, so I have to refresh to get it to load to the main thread again after it's posted.

And I can't work out how to delete my army of post clones. This is terrible.

Why is that posted SIX TIMES? This is surely a sign of the impending apocalypse.