I'm not a scientist but do you have a progress review coming up? If so be honest with the reviewers about how you are feeling. Do you have a second supervisor? If not, ask for one - it's good practice to have one and sometimes getting a new eye on a project can help to see some way of redeeming the project.

Hi, have a think about whether there are any potential public policy debates your topic might be relevant too (you don't have to actually commit to engage yourself with it) - e.g say you were working on Kymlicka then your research might have relevance to debates on developing social justice practice in multicultural societies like the UK, or say Rorty's ideas how society might be structured could have relevance to those fed up with contemporary UK politics. This is what I think they're getting at on applications. But remember too that it's a standard form for all humanities subjects some of which will be very applied, so so long as you put something, I wouldn't worry too much.

Also Tony just a thought but have you asked your current tutors for advice? Maybe someone could look over your application and give you some tips?

re the passport. It's the new immigration rules. I'm white British with a British sounding name and I've had to send a copy of my passport with my application or take it to interview for every job I've applied for this year. Universities are protecting themselves because if they employ anyone without the right to work in the UK, then they risk losing their ability to sponsor Tier 4 visas, which basically means no international students or staff any more.
Honestly too because of the recession so many people are trying for funded PhDs that only being rejected from two is nothing. Particularly if the one with 25 places was for all subjects in a faculty, it means in reality there was probably one place allocated to your subject area and lots of people chasing it. THose adverts can be quite misleading.

Isn't the issue more that PhD researchers are not considered eligible to apply for funding by many funding organisations as you have to have a contract that covers the duration of the grant in place before you apply? I rather doubt attending 10 days of training would make any real difference if you're not eligible in the first place. But why not take advantage of the courses on this sort of thing that are offered by Vitae - I'm sure they offer leadership training and it's aimed at PhD students. Or ask your graduate school if they'd organise something for you?
Oh and it works the other way too - since I became a postdoc, I can attend all sorts of these (usually utterly pointless) staff development courses, but was I allowed to attend the training day on a research method that I'd really like to learn? No - PhD students only allowed. I think it's because the training budgets come from different sources.

It is pretty normal not to teach in the first year of a PhD. My university had a blanket ban on it, as they thought it was bad for PhD students and bad for the undergrads, although if your university is using MA students to teach, then I rather guess they don't have that idea! So first thing is don't panic! You could perhaps use your first year to do some of the work for the teaching in HE qualification - it's often called something like PGCert in academic practice. When I was a PhD student we all had to do the first module in first year if we wanted to TA in later years. Then I'd ask your supervisor whether this is a one-off budgetary crisis or an ongoing strategy to cope with funding cuts. If she reckons you'd be able to get teaching in other years then I'd leave it for now. If not then yes ask the flim studies department for paid work and write to other nearby universities asking them to keep you in mind if they have any teaching gaps.

This might just be my opinion after seeing how hourly paid staff are treated in two universities but please don't volunteer to work for free. Universities already treat hourly paid staff pretty badly in my opinion - the initial hourly pay sounds good, but then you realise all the hours of work it doesn't cover, no pay in the summer, no sick pay, no pension and not knowing from year to year whether you'll have any work the next year...and unfortunately that's often the positions that humanities and social science PhDs take on finishing or running out of funding to a) pay the bills and b) try to hang on in academia while chasing elusive jobs & postdocs. If people like you volunteer to work for free then you're eroding the terms and conditions still further. God I sound like UCU I know, but please don't!

Sneaks have you read the further particulars on the uni website? Generally this gives you some more clues about what they are after. My general rule of thumb has been that if I meet the essential criteria for appointment, then why not apply, even if I'm missing some of the desirable criteria. Tbh though unless you're in a field where doing postdocs really is seen as compulsory eg lab-based sciences, I can't imagine anyone thinking you were presumptuous in applying (unless the ad specifies a completed PhD as essential).

Hallo Salwa,

I'm not sure from your post whether you've formally applied to universities and been rejected or just not had replies to e-mails asking if the person was interested. If you've not actually been filling the forms in and applying then you must do that. I remember when I applied that some institutions did not want you to approach staff directly as they felt that stopped them having a fair admissions process.

Also has a native speaker of English proofread your application materials? There are some serious grammar errors in your post (although I know we are all careless on the internet, so it may not be a good example of your abilities) and so I wonder, given your topic, if you are being rejected because of concerns about your English. British universities are now being monitored on numbers of home and international studies successfully completing PhDs within four years and as a result, many are now unwilling to accept students, who they think might struggle to meet that goal. (Research has shown that inadequate English abilities are a major cause of students not completing in time.)

Would your scholarship allow you to apply for either a research training MA in your field or even a postgraduate foundation course that offers intensive English training as a precursor to the PhD? Both might be easier to gain entry to, and would allow you to arrange meetings in person with prospective supervisors and develop a proposal with their help. I'd also second what others have said about getting help from your MA institution - is doing a phd there not a possibility?

Are you / she in the UK? This is all UK-specific so apologies if irrelevant. If she's a member of UCU then I'd suggest going to one of their reps to get some advice on her legal position, but regardless of the justice of the situation, I have a nasty feeling that she's not got much hope, as I know a lot of science postdocs who've had their contracts terminated at the end of the grant under which they were originally employed. This is UNLESS she's been continuously employed on the same contract for more than 4 years in which case I think there's been a ruling based on EU law that says she must be given a permanent contract (look on the UCU or Timeshighereducation.co.uk websites and do a search for it - it was reported in the press). PIs can't terminate contracts though - it's a HR decision and so I suspect it will turn out to be legal.

My understanding of the problem she faces from talking to science postdocs is that research councils do not allow people without permanent contracts to be sole PIs, and in some cases PIs at all, so the PI possibly had strong grounds for not making her a co-PI. What I think would be rather important is whether she has any written records of the decision not to write her in as a named researcher, his rationale for not doing so and any promises she was made about being employed on the grant despite not being named. If any promises were made in writing, then there might be a bit of a case to be made. Similarly, if she could prove sex discrimination i.e. that she has been treated differently on this to male postdocs in comparable cases by the PI, then that might also be a case. However, unless there's something dynamite that might sway HR to act, both those are probably routes to an employment tribunal rather than continued employment.

I rather suspect that the university owns the intellectual property to her research, but this is something that should be specified in her contract or in the documents she was sent at the time of appointment, and varies from place to place so she needs to check that out herself to see if there's any room for complaint on that basis.

Unfortunately your friend seems not to have really realised how insecure being a postdoc is. If the PI was giving out signals that her continued employment was in doubt (which it seems he was in not naming her on the grant) then she really needed to be applying elsewhere then - not that that helps now. Very few postdocs get lectureships in the sciences from what I'm told, so I suppose the other thing she needs to think is whether she continues to try for an academic career or tries the industry route. If she is determined to stay in academia, it would be a good idea to get advice from someone she trusts there, about how best to get agreement on subsequent publications based on her data to make sure her name is on them.

Sorry this isn't very encouraging and I do think, like in all abusive employment situations, your friends has moral right on her side. What I'm afraid is that she may not have legal right. Universities are not very good employers really. They treat postdocs badly and their hourly paid staff are even worse off. I hope something in this essay might help.

There is a national pay scale so the differences between pay for fulltime staff is broadly the same across all institutions. The problem is getting that fulltime job, as unless you are in an area like accountancy where people willing to work in academia are hard to find, there aren't that many available and lots of people chasing them. I wonder though, given you aren't keen on research, whether doing a PhD and trying to get a lectureship would make you happy? Even at teaching intensive places, you are still expected to do research and bring in research income (often through consultancy work) as a lecturer - it's part of the job even if it's less emphasised than at a Russell Group type of university. I suspect as we head into an era of cuts, then expectations to raise external income with rise further too. Given you've got FE experience, wouldn't you perhaps be better not doing the PhD and trying to get into the foundation degree sector where you wouldn't need to do research - it's the age group you want and just teaching / pastoral / admin? Or even looking at the sorts of roles in student support in universities? I just can't imagine getting through a PhD if you didn't get some enjoyment out of the research process, and an academic job would mean that you are expected to continue with it throughout your career. Perhaps alternatives might work better for you and also mean less financial sacrifice.

It doesn't really matter what it's called so long as the Higher Education Academy recognise it as either entitling you (on successful completion) to apply for fellowship of the HEA (or as with a lot of the courses offered to new PhD students that it forms part of such a qualification). Like tester says while it won't make any difference to your chances of getting a job somewhere research intensive, it might help at a teaching intensive university, and it does mean you don't have to do it further down the line. Even if it's just a partial qualification, it's still worth doing to help you think through the teaching. (The course I did as a postdoc, I couldn't have completed in full as a PhD student as I didn't have a high enough level of teaching responsibility to e.g. redesign modules, but because I'd done an equivalent to the first module at my PhD granting institution, they gave me exemption from that module.)

Reread your own post with honesty - were you a school bully by any chance?

No - the only exceptions I could think of might be possibly if the thesis dealt with modern Greek literature and was defended in a Modren Greek Dept or if on ancient Greece and written in ancient Greek at a very traditional university and even then I imagine you'd have to have a very good explanation. Why not do a PhD at a Greek or Cypriot university?

From a postdoc perspective, I look back fondly at my PhD years already as I found it less stressful, and with horror at the workload and pressure put on young lecturers in the social sciences. It's certainly not the cushy number, that the general public thinks it is. But I did ask that question myself: the answer I got was that you have to really enjoy teaching and research and accept that you are going to spend a hefty amount of time doing admin (much more I have to say than I ever realised lecturers did administratively - even as an ex-civil servant that really has been an eye-opener). If you ticked that box OK, then what they reckoned was that it wasn't for the sensitive as there you're pretty much continually being evaluated as an individual and as part of your dept, be it through peer review, teaching observations and evaluations, the RAE/REF and NSS, and you have to be able to accept that a lot of often hurtful criticism is going to come your way. On the other hand you get paid to read books and teach your subject, which is pretty good. It is definitely a long hours culture but they are flexible, and despite the constant targets and evaluation you're micro-managed much less on a day-to-day basis than in other jobs.
Other thoughts: all my experiences have been in Russell Group unis - I don't know whether it's less stressful in other parts of the sector even if teaching loads are higher. There might be less pressure to be top ten in everything. That said, it's probably easier to teach the standard Russell Group AAB type student - you have a much less mixed student body. Or are the high-achievers more demanding. No idea just speculation.
Thought 2: the next 5-10 years are going to be bad - whoever wins the election, the cuts are going to be painful and mean lots of job losses. No-one can really say where it's going to hit hardest but there's universities in financial trouble at all ends of the sector. Just read http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment_index.asp - it doesn't make pretty reading and there are lots more rumours circulating. I heard today that Bristol is looking at cutting 400 jobs after being caught out financially to stock market exposure. So it's not exactly secure employment. Who'd have thought a university like Sussex would decide that research and research-led teaching in English social history before 1700, and the history of continental Europe before 1900 was unnecessary for example. I always thought the French Revolution for example was rather crucial to know about.
So actually my decision to keep applying for academic jobs after knowing all that and having accepted a lectureship a few weeks ago to start in September, suggests that I'm insane. But I love my research and I really like teaching, so even all the bad sides don't put me off. The one thing I would say though is that the older members of staff, who often walked into jobs in the 1960s/70s with just a BA or MA and have had quite an easy time of it over the years are not the ones you need to talk to - talk to the people appointed in the last three years or so. They'll have much more useful feedback in my opinion.
Sorry for the essay but it was quite cathartic, as I have been thinking a LOT about this.