I can get the first one, will email it to you (just please hit the 'helpful user' button!)

Morning everyone.

I'm late to arrive at my desk, but I have already been swimming and sorted out printing my poster for summer school, so I'm not feeling too bad about it!

Goals for today
1.) Swimming - DONE
2.) Get poster sent for printing - DONE
3.) Spend one hour going through backlog of journal alerts
4.) Prioritise some journal reading and read a good number of articles
5.) Erm, obsess about whether organisations have launched my survey yet and check my emails constantly until I hear from them :$

Hello everyone

Button - hope the news wasn't anything too bad, and that you get into the work okay.

This week I'm mainly killing time while I wait for the two organisations I'm studying to launch my questionnaires for me - I don't have access to their email systems to send the things out, so that's down to them, and seems to be taking ages. Oh well. I'm off to Summer School for a week on Sunday, and after that I'm straight off on holiday for two weeks, so this week feels like a bit of dead time really. I have to design a poster to take with me to Summer School, and I'm going to do some work on the structure of a journal paper, but that's kind of it for the week! Time to clean my flat from top to bottom I think.

Yay, questionnaires all finished and ready to go. All I need now is for my two organisations to come back with the final go-ahead and I can put them live and my data collection will begin! Woo.

Now to sit around twiddling my thumbs while I wait. Hmm. Maybe I'll look at the backlog of journal alerts I've been ignoring for the last few weeks (er, months...)

I hadn't seen it before (I've only really been looking at quant stuff so far, but qual will be my next step) so thanks very much for pointing it out!

I don't like working late but have found myself doing that more than I wanted to over the last few months. Oh well. Once I get going I'm generally okay, but if I start the day by procrastinating that's it, I'm done for.

Just been to a mildly interesting seminar given by a visiting academic in my department, so now it's back to updating the online versions of my questionnaire. In theory, this could go live and my data collection could start as soon as I've finished this task, but in reality there might be a short delay while I wait for the organisations I'm studying to actually press start. So I'll either be crazy busy or twiddling my thumbs. Hmm.

Same here, no luck, sorry

At my uni there are 3 dates when you can start a PhD - 1 October, 1 January and 1 April. Most do start in October, but probably about a quarter start at other times.

In my department most people are project funded or funded on departmental bursaries and very few people do any teaching (just the specialist nature of the department - there aren't any undergraduate courses I could teach, for example).

And time off works just fine - in fact, my supervisors keep reminding me to take a break, so I had 2 weeks off at Christmas/New Year, and a week at Easter, and am going to have two weeks off next month, plus whatever days here and there that I want to take. Obviously I work whatever hours are needed to get things into a position where I can take the time off, but it seems to work pretty well here.

Seems to vary quite a lot between universities, departments and even supervisors!

Heh - doing that to an empty room might be therapeutic, and probably better than doing it to your supervisor's face!

Sympathy with you all for suffering these frustrating supervisors and their frustrating advice!

My frustration is that the site that hosts my online survey has just crashed. So I could just clear off home instead of waiting for it to start working again. I'm actually feeling on top of things, so maybe I will do that!

It's all handled by the software - test versions seemed to come out okay, so hopefully it's all fine! But I will double check that, thanks for the prompt!

That sounds like a very satisfying errand, Sneaks!

My questionnaire wordings are all updated, I just have to change the online versions to match and then write a cover email for one of the organisations. Then it's just down to my contacts in the organisations getting final clearance from their senior management to send out my emails, and my first major bit of data collection will be launched! Of course, the final clearances may take a few days, and I'll be hopping around nervously imagining all sorts of crises until it's finally all gone through....

It was fine for me too. And looks like an interesting topic as well. Good luck with it!

Morning everyone!

Today I need to finalise two slightly different versions of my questionnaire, and update their online versions. That sounds nice and straightforward, doesn't it? We'll see...

Oh you're all giving me a pavlova urge now....

Managed to spend most of the afternoon messing around on the internet and updating some completely pointless admin forms. So now I need to keep working for longer than I intended to get a few more things done. But I have at least done some laundry!

Sounds like you are getting back into it, star-shaped.

Just got back home after my meeting with the second host organisation, and now I have to rush to get the changes to the questionnaire discussed this morning ready for the final version to go live in a couple of days or so. Yikes! But it's all very encouraging and exciting, and it looks like my data collection will actually happen. Yay!

Goals for today:
1.) Make final decisions about the wordings discussed this morning
2.) Edit online versions of questionnaires to match
3.) Do some laundry! I'm wearing my very last clean clothes :$