Environmental psychology, with some more cross-disciplinary environmental stuff thrown in.

Surely The Adventure Game was the best one ever - if it counts as a gameshow - though maybe I'm showing my age too much there! Ah, those wonderful days watching dim-witted contestants trying to figure out the Drogna and then getting zapped on the final challenge!

Or The Great Egg Race, though that's straying even further from the gameshow idea. Ah well, it was fun.

My brain seems to have become mush since those days, anyway. Now it's Hole in the Wall that keeps me amused!

Hi

I had a similar thing for my Masters degree - my employer (a local authority) would pay my fees but I had to stay with them for four years after graduating; if I left within 2 years I had to repay all the fees, within 3 years 50% of the fees, within 4 years 25% of the fees. (I decided not to take them up on this, a good thing since I left to start my PhD as soon as I finished the Masters!) I had the impression this was fairly standard in this situation, where I didn't strictly need the qualification to do the job but they would still benefit from me gaining it.

However, it sounds like your situation is different - they say you need the qualification, rather than it being something you're choosing to do purely from your own interest. In that situation it does sound harsh, particularly if you can't do the qualification with them (which woul presumably be cheaper for them than paying fees to a different institution). But I don't know how common this is in this sector, I'm afraid. I suppose from their perspective they don't want to invest in you only to see you leave before they can get the benefit from their investment. My feeling is that if this is the deal that's on the table, and you have no other real options, it's worth just going with it and not letting yourself feel resentful about it. At least they are paying your fees! And once you've got the qualification it might be that you can walk into a good enough pay rise that paying back at least part of the fees doesn't look nearly as bad anyway....

Cheers

Batfink

Hi Lopaka

You don't mention whether you have any experience of writing fiction? This is going to be the first question anyone asks you, and if you don't then I would suggest a PhD is not the way forward, at least at first. I suspect that unless you have substantial evidence of writing ability and experience - and by that I mean writing fiction, not academic writing - you will struggle to find a PhD place. Writing a novel is not simply about having an idea or a structure for a novel, it's about the writing itself as well. I know - I've written six!

Have you thought about doing an MA in Creative Writing as a first step? Some of the courses have a more literary-criticism focus while others have a craft-led focus on developing your writing style and abilities. I did an MA in Creative Writing 10 years ago (yikes!! doesn't seem that long!) which was very good with a strong craft focus and I learnt a huge amount about the fiction writing process from that.

The other alternative is to just go ahead and write the novel without it being part of an academic course. If your intention is to develop a career as a writer then that's the more traditional way to go about it - having a PhD in creative writing would not necessarily make it any easier to get published!

Hope that helps, and good luck with it!

Batfink

That sounds very much how I've been feeling too. I've decided not to worry about it because it does seem that everyone else goes through the same thing. When I discussed this with one of my supervisors he just smiled and said that's what a PhD is like, you just have to accept that you'll go off down blind alleys and have to come back out to something more general again, but it's all a process of edging closer to a clear idea of what you're going to look at. I hope he's right!

I use RefWorks too and it's invaluable. The thing I like about it is that you can put references into multiple folders, so I've started using the folder system as a way of sorting the references by various keywords - makes it so much quicker when I'm looking for a reference or looking for somewhere to start when thinking about a topic area I haven't properly researched yet. I didn't use a system like this for my Masters, and I coped fine then, but it would have been very useful to have already started my own database when I was just starting the PhD. Highly recomended!

Hi Phoebe

I think we both started our PhDs at the same time, and I've been feeling a little the way you describe as well. Not as much as you feel it - I haven't thought about quitting, but I have thought that there's just so much to get my head around, and three years seemed like a long time at the start but now looks like almost no time at all even to read everything I want to read. I think Sneaks is probably right, this is a stage and we all face it. Maybe it's the end of the honeymoon period where the excitement of starting out on a new adventure has started to wear off? I don't know how much that will help you, but maybe just knowing most people will face this at some point will help??

And other students in my department can either be great - friendly and chatty and lovely - or they can just freak me out completely: one guy who started a month before me told me he was finishing his literature review at Christmas, which scared the pants off me, because I'd barely even started mine. But we're all different, and I'm not convinced that rushing ahead like that is the best way forward. I know for sure I'm months and months (and probably years!!) off thinking about writing for publication, and I think that's normal.

I guess I'm saying don't be so hard on yourself! If it all looked easy and obvious at this early stage it probably wouldn't be worth studying, so do hang in there and give yourself the space to explore what you're doing without beating yourself up that you haven't sussed it all out yet. I'm sure we'll all get there in the end!

Thank you, my first star has appeared :-)

Hi Matt

I'm at a very similar stage to you (started my PhD in October) and I've been puzzling over the same thing.

My university supports RefWorks rather than EndNote but my impression is that they're very similar. I use RefWorks as a database of all the references I've found and have something like 250 references in there at the moment (although I've only read a fraction of those so far). I use the folders system in RefWorks to sort the references into different topics (some papers are listed in 3 or 4 or 5 folders) so I can find them by general topic.

When I'm reading I write notes in spiral-bound notebooks, and for any paper that I think I might possibly one day want to come back to I then write a summary in a Word document, one page per paper sorted alphabetically by primary author, listing the key points in the paper, where the paper is saved, when I read it and which notebook my notes are in. It's a bit time consuming so I don't know how religiously I'll keep this up, but I'm finding that the process of reading and then a week-ish later coming back and summarising my notes is helping me to identify what the key points are, and spot interesting connections I might otherwise have missed, and I think it's helping me to develop a feeling for the literature in my area. With some papers it's literally just a few lines - the paper's mostly not relevant but this method of calculating data is interesting, or the author's summary of another paper I've read puts a different slant on it, that sort of thing. With other papers it's obvious it's an important text so I do a more detailed summary.

Actually, I'd be really interested to know whether anyone else does anything like this, or if it really will turn out to be too time consuming to keep up. I'm always feeling anxious that I'm not reading enough, or I'm missing out important areas in the literature, so I'll be really interested to read what other people have to say about this!

best wishes

Batfink

Hi Someone3

I've applied for lots of jobs in the UK over the years, although never as an academic - I know how general job applications work but maybe someone else can say if the specifics of an academic job are a bit different.

It sounds to me like you just need to fill out the online application form, then wait until the closing date and hope you get an interview. The email you sent means that they know you're interested in applying, but to make your application official you need to follow the procedure they've set down. Even if they think you're perfect for the job, it's very unlikely you'd hear anything before the closing date, as that's part of the procedure they've set up for applications, and they're supposed to try to make it fair for everyone applying by sticking to the procedure they've published.

If you've listed your supervisor as a reference for the job then you definitely need to mention this to your supervisor, but it might be a good idea to mention it anyway just to keep him in the loop. I'm not sure about what else you can do, I'd just wait to hear whether I got an interview because they will probably be very strict about following their procedures, but maybe someone else has more suggestions about that.

Good luck with the application anyway!

best wishes

Batfink

Hi Bcc

I was in a similar position myself when I was finishing off my MSc and looking around for PhDs. The uni I did my MSc at kept talking about there being PhD funding coming up, maybe, and that I'd be ideal for it, maybe, but every time it looked like they might actually get around to advertising the studentship it would get delayed. So I saw a studentship advertised at another uni nearby (one with a much better reputation!) and applied for that, and asked the people who would be my PhD supervisors at my old uni to be my referees - I figured it might nudge them into offering me the funding I needed to stay, I didn't really expect the other uni to offer me a place. I had an interview for the other uni, and as I expected I didn't get the studentship (it went to someone with more specific knowledge for their project) but they liked me so much at interview that they found departmental funding and offered me a studentship anyway, to design my own project. At which point my original uni suddenly leapt in and offered me funding too, so I got to choose between them. And chose the second, better uni - definitely the right choice!! It was a bit awkward telling the lecturers at the original uni that after months of talking about staying on I was going elsewhere, but they understood, and we're still in contact.

What I think this shows is that if you find supervisors who are keen to take you on they'll do all they can to help you get funding, and will support you, and even if that means you turn down places elsewhere, it's not seen as a bad thing, but a totally understandable thing where you have to make a decision that suits you. The funding I was offered at my old uni was snapped up by someone else a month or so later so everything worked out fine in that sense, and it gave me a good boost to know I was in charge of my own decisions rather than clinging on to the first opportunity I had.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

I have two supervisors. My main one's more experienced and high-profile and is often away at conferences; my second one is a newer member of staff so is around more. They're both great, and offer lots of support. We meet about every week to ten days, depending on their availability, usually for about half an hour to an hour, and when my main supervisor's away at conferences I just meet with my second one. They ask me to submit something to them in writing about once a month. I don't see them very often outside these meetings - occasionally bump into them in the corridor and say hello, but we don't stop and chat or go for coffee or anything like that.

Do you like crime novels? I've just read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - it's high quality crime, not trashy at all, and has great characters that really drew me in - the title character's great, a kind of gothy delinquent security specialist / computer hacker who won't let anyone put one over on her. One of those books you can completely immerse yourself in.

Hi Matt

I'm sorry to hear you're having a hard time at the moment. I can't really comment on the depression angle, but as to the feeling that you've been working really hard but aren't getting anywhere - I can totally relate to that. I'm a first year too, and for the past few weeks I've been feeling that I'm making no progress at all, and have this fear that I'm dropping behind other people who started at the same time as me, and that my supervisors will start asking me why I haven't achieved more when I know I've been working as hard as I can. Not helped by another PhD student who started a few weeks before me and keeps coming up to me to tell me how well he's doing and how far ahead he is! However, yesterday I had a meeting with one of my two supervisors, and he told me that he thinks I'm making real progress and have really sharpened my ideas since starting. I suppose what that shows is that our own impressions of how we think we're doing aren't always right, and we're probably doing a lot better than we think!

Homesickness isn't going to help, I'm sure. As I say, I can't advise on the depression, but I do think you need to find a way to give yourself a proper break over Christmas, even if it's only a few days - allow yourself time to not even think about the work and find ways to relax, there's absolutely no point trying to burn yourself out.

Hope you do get a good break, and take care

Batfink

I agree, I've been in a relationship for the last 3 years and now I've started my PhD it's great to have someone to talk to and to spend my spare time with who isn't doing a PhD! I feel like I can stay in touch with the real world and not get too lost in the intricacies of my chosen field of study - my partner would be bored stupid if all I could talk to him about was my PhD, so it forces me to think about other things every evening, which I think is pretty healthy anyway.

I have to admit I'm a little nervous about what will happen at the end of the PhD though! My partner did say once that he'd move with me to wherever a postdoc job came up (he works from home so can be based anywhere, which is lucky), but I know how much he likes his life where we are, and the big group of friends he has, and it'll be a big thing to ask him to follow me to somewhere where he knows nobody. Hopefully he'll do it though! Either that or a job will come up within an easy commute of where we live!

The early stages of a relationship are always really overwhelming though - I can see how that could really interfere with someone's studies. All that gazing off into the distance with a stupid grin on your face.... :-) But overall, we can't put our lives on hold for three or four years, if opportunities come up we shouldn't hide away from life just because we're studying. Not the same as going out actively looking for that love of one's life, of course....