I can't help but wonder if a supervisor needs an assistant wouldn't they have hired one already? And if they need one in future it could be open to lots of people. I applied for an RA post during my Masters, and there were about 50 applicants. I was incredibly lucky to be one of two interviewed. And I got it. I didn't know the person who would be my boss, and later became my PhD supervisor, so it wasn't a case of a job that was basically mine, and they were just going through the formalities.

But maybe your supervisors will have more opportunities :-)

Personally I think funding counts for an awful lot. It shows that you competed in a competitive market, and were chosen (in my field only 1 in 5 applicants wins funding!). And to stress the point I've recently been updating my CV, and made sure that I noted that I had been funded by a research council for my PhD.

Would waiting another year really be so awful? It could certainly save you an awful lot of money.

I was never at the uni so had to buy a copy if I wanted to use EndNote at my base at home. And it was totally worth it, even though I didn't use it to automatically generate footnote references or bibliography. But it did a wonderful job of remembering many many hundreds of journal papers and books, which I would have otherwise forgotten reading.

I used EndNote to organise what I'd read. Because I'm a humanities student most of my papers/books were in print format, so I need a big bookshelf and filing cabinet at home to store them all! But the same principle applies. I use a field in EndNote to record where I've stored the copy of the paper - and that works for the rare PDF copies I have as well.

Because I was a part-time PhD student, over 6 years, plus with severe memory problems due to progressive brain damage, I'd forgotten most of the things I'd read years earlier. But luckily EndNote remembered them all for me, and my bibliography at the end was nice and full :)

The OU is an established university. I switched from computer science (former PhD student as well) to history through them, gaining my BA with the OU, then going on to a Masters locally, and a PhD as well. The OU degree was very well regarded by everyone I dealt with subsequently, including the funding council who funded my second go at a PhD.

Good luck Sue, both with adjusting back to the job, and with finishing off the thesis full draft.

The allowance on workload is woefully inadequate at my uni. My supervisor told me how many hours the "bean counters" think he spends on each PhD student. Way way way too small. And he had a lot of students. Fortunately rather a lot of us have just graduated, so his load has eased.

I'd recommend that you email your to-be supervisor and seek their advice on relevant packages etc. Otherwise you might spend time learning something else, but end up not using it at all.

Make sure you stress your contribution in the abstract Chris, i.e. why your work is important, and what your big conclusions were, and why it's new and important. That way you hit the examiners with this before they read the rest of it :)

Good luck tonight Chris! Just one more day to go. Hang on in there.

I don't think emailing the supervisor in the way you've described would be nagging. It's a reasonable question, you want to improve your chances in future, and are seeking their advice.

So, basically, do it!

Good luck!

Why do you want a PhD, why do you want to do this topic, and why do you think you'll be the perfect match for it. Answer those questions simply and straightforwardly.

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