Is your masters from the same university that you are doing the PhD at?

Hi Gemini,
You need to check with the immigration bureau that you are applying for your visa from. Overstaying or breaching the terms of a visa is a serious issue, so you need to be clear from the correct authorities exactly how much you can work. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that any student visa would allow full-time working as the visa is issued for a student, not a full-time worker. But you need to find this out from an official source rather than word of mouth on the internet.
Hope it works out.

I don't have time to go through and search for you but things to look out for are:

1. Interest free overdraft
2. Overdraft that gives you a year to pay it off after graduation before being charged interest
3. Whoever is giving the best freebies (some banks give free travel insurance for 3 years, or student railcard for 3 years)
4. AVOID CREDIT CARDS (In fact I would say do NOT get an account with a credit card), the temptation is too high and the possibility of paying a credit card off as a student is low, so do not fall into that trap.

In my experience HSBC do a very good student account, but after I graduated my experience with them was not so good so I have since switched to another bank.

The main UK banks are HSBC, Santander, Halifax, Lloyds and Barclays. They should all have web pages explaining their accounts. I would make a spreadsheet to compare the offers and go from there!

It can be really difficult when things change. Adjusting to a new way of working and new people can be really hard. You situation is very different to mine because you are in the sciences by the sounds of it, so my advice can only be general. My advice is just to wait a bit (I wouldn't go to the careers service but just carry on 'as usual'). This one needs time to settle IMO. Give it a couple of weeks with the new supervisor and then think about it some more. For now, try to forget about it, and motivate yourself to do (very) small chunks of achievable tasks each day. Whatever you do, don't decide anything when you're in this state of mind...It's OK, normal, natural, understandable, not your fault that you feel low, but its not the state of mind in which to make decisions other than to wait where you are for now.
*hugs*

If you live at home you could very easily do it part-time and work part-time to fund it. I don't see that your situation is particularly dramatic or 'unfair' as you put it, it's just the way the system is...

Good point wowzers - although having worked in HR myself, a 'good' HR person (from the employer's perspective) could use the 'any other duties as required by the employer' clause if it's there. They may have trouble justifying it as being reasonable I expect. It would be good to hear what the contractual perspective on this is.

Yeah, very cute!

I did your survey and wanted to say thanks for the little surprise at the end! Very nice.

Are there any mods around to delete all of the fake passport/documents and other spam threads? They seem to be taking over, surely I'm not the only one irritated by them?! :-)

Hey OP - I had a similar problem recently, and all the listing and planning I usually do didn't help this time. In the end I decided on 4 small tasks I absolutely HAD to do every day (so for example - 'Read one paper' and 'spend 30 minutes writing').
I printed them out on the PC as a little to-do list, I printed about 10 copies. Every day I dated the list and ticked off those 4 little tasks as I did them. The tasks were all small and totally achievable in one day, and I found that these jump started the rest of my work for the day. By the time I got to the bottom of my stack of copies I was back in the flow and working through the day. I like to think of those 4 tasks as my drain unblockers now!
I hope you find your rhythm soon!

I feel like I'm being a bit daft here, but even if £28,000 from your partner is before tax, I calculate your post tax joint income to £35,400.

Unless you have a ridiculously high mortgage/rent and/or other massive debts you are paying off, or live in London, that is more than enough for 3 people to live on, even if you had to pay £8000 a year for childcare.

If you calculate your childcare to £8000, you are still left with over £2000 monthly income between the three of you. You would be a lot better off financially than many others who are doing a PhD. Sure, you might not be able to have a holiday for 3 years, but I think some perspective might help you here.

Unless the issue is really that you don't think you should have to pay for your own child's care?

I don't know why my previous post was deleted, but there is a website called Lang-8 dot com where you can put work for checking by native speakers. It's worth checking out for future instances.

Hi MrsButterby

I'm glad you are feeling much calmer and happier about the situation.

My advice would be to think about the total number of words you need to get written before your first full draft submission, and the number of full working days you have free to work on it. Divide number of words by working days and that is you daily word count target (not including revisions). Then sit down each day and absolutely make yourself write those words, no matter what. Personally I think that just getting the bulk of it out of your head and onto the paper is the number one goal, and I don't think it really matters what order you do them in. (You could 500 words on chapter 1, 600 on chapter 2 in the same day and it just doesn't matter).

Some other good advice I find useful is to write the easy stuff first, to get into the swing of it. If you get stuck and aren't sure what to write next, instead of stopping to stress over it, write in block capitals or some other obvious font 'come back later' or 'needs work' and move on straight away.

Once you have the words on paper you can start thinking more about how they fit together and what your narrative is. These are just a few things that have helped me in the past, but I hope you find what works for you.

Good luck!

I would just email them and ask if there is any progress on the amended proposal that you sent. I wouldn't mention funding. Just say you are still interested in the offer of an interview and give the reasons why you want to try for that place. Try not to sound desperate but remain confident.
It sounds like the supervisor at Uni A would have heard about your application to Uni B in the end anyway, (if they supervised that person's PhD), so I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about being honest.
Its done now anyway, and you can't change that, so best to look forward and deal with the situation as it is. Try not to panic, sometimes the best way to learn these kind of things is to make a small mistake and stay professional whilst trying to solve it. Best of luck to you anyway.

Are you sure they aren't just offering you a 'writing up year', where you reduce your registration status, pay less fees and don't have formal supervisions? Your sup may have used the word 'withdraw' when what they meant was to change your registration status for a writing up period. I am aware that this arrangement does exist at some universities.

It might be worth arranging a meeting with your supervisor and any support/pastoral tutor you have assigned to you to discuss this in detail because they may just be trying to help you out financially with this arrangement. It is also worth considering that as you are an international student they may have certain restrictions that mean you can't remain in the UK as a student much longer and they are trying to avoid a visa situation. Like I say, I would seek clarity on what it is they are suggesting before panicking.