Some of these stories have really made me laugh. Especially running off with Jake Gyllenhall (sp)!
Glad it seems most people have strange PhD dreams! I've had the "naked in a strange place" dream before so will probably have that at some point. worst was when I worked as a waitress and had to serve food with a duvet wrapped round me! is pretty hard to carry plates like that!

I still want to know how my PhD novel worked....if all else fails I could become a writer as in the dream it was a cracking novel :p

The main reason I am glad i didn't go straight from UG to MSc to PhD is financial. because i spent a few years working (but still living like a student!) I started my PhD with savings. If I had gone straight from uni I'd have been scraping the bottom of my overdraft from the beginning and would have stuggled more finacially.

Thinking of people I know most were in their early to mid 20s when they began. I started age 27 and I'm not really sure how much of a diffence those 4/5 years made. probably not a lot!

Sounds good. Hope it all goes well.
My friend and I celebrated our first PhD presentations with an afternoon in the pub! (well it was a couple of weeks before christmas) so hope you've got something nice planned for afterwards.

I've had a couple in the past week, the latest one, I dreamt that instead of writing up my PhD as normal, I had written a fictional novel based on my research! I was trying to convince my supervisor that this was acceptible! I'm not even sure how such a thinkg would even work, but it in the dream it clearly did!

Anyone else dream about their PhD? Luckily so far most my PhD dreams aren't nightmares, but imaging I'll have the failing viva/forgetting to turn up to viva/forgetting to wear any clothes to viva type dreams soon enough!

I had to do a 10 min presentation 2 months after starting.
I introduced the topic very briefly, when on to my main research questions and aims, a brief sumary of the methods I was going to use and why...and I can't remember how I finished it! probably a summary of all of the above and asked for questions.

With 15/20 mins you can go into more details about all of the above, or perhaps present some of the possible methods you might use, and ask for people's thoughs of feedback on them.

Good luck with it.

I think Mann-Whitney U test sounds right. You basically want a non-Parametric version of a Independent Samples t-test, right?

Out of interest what doesn't sound right from Andy Field's example?

Thanks for the input. I was thinking past tense, but reading the present tense thesis it did kind of make sense. Many of the tests I've used are commonly used ones, and hence I'm not just saying how I administered them, but also how they should be done, and how they will be done in the future. Maybe present tense gets that accross. The text book I've been looking at uses this as in "In the administration of this test the participant is instructed xyz"

Anyone else got a view?

Quick question mainly to those of you in Psychology (but guess could crop up in any area) I'm struggling with my use of tense in written work. I'm trying to describe my cognitive test battery in terms of what the participants had to do in each task. I can decide whether to use past or present tense, and whether to talk about one participant or plural.

For example

The participant is instructed to read each word out loud
The participants are instructed to read each word out loud
The participant was instructed to read each word out loud
The participants were instructed to read each word out loud

I have a copy of an excellent thesis (sups words) who went with option 1, as does Lezak in Neuropsychological Assessment. I find this an odd way to talk about what I did do on the other hand I'm not sure.

I just had an "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH I'm never going to get this finished" moment! My absolute deadline is Sept 30th as that is the end of my continuation year. I have finding until March 2011 and after that will be living on savings etc.

I don't have anywhere near enough words written and still have some analysis/interpretation of analysis left to do. Think I will need this thread to keep me on track! :-)

Congratulatons on getting thesis in. Seeing people do it is a good motivation to get on with the writing..... That hand in day seems both on the horizon and a long way away at the moment.

Read more fiction. I do read stuff but I have to limit myslef as I'm not capable of just reading a little bit before bed... I stay up late and finish the whole book!
Other than that I'd like a holiday. My motivation to get written up is so I don't spend all my savings and can get away.

Love the idea of go ape too. I'm scared of heights but think I'll be ok if in a harness (maybe)

Neuropsychological Assessment by Lezak is a good place to find out about what tests are out there for these mental attributes. Might be worth looking if there is a copy in your library.

I'd also think sustained attention would be a good thing to look at. I use a Rapid Visual Information Processing task in my cognitive test battery, which I vaguely remember reading was developed to test abilities of pilots....but now have no idea what or where the source for the information was!

Another thought, I may have mis-understood, but if you have access to a simulator wouldn't it complicate the study to look at cognitive performance rather than simply comparing flying performance in the simulator?...thought I guess you can always correlate cognition with simulator performance to add strength to your arguements.

Yes...though love it when it happend but it is still a drinkable temparature!

Now really want tea. Have milk here but need to walk to shop for tea :-(

I've always done it the same was as you Sneaks. Blooming annoying and means I usually end up with at least one incorrect reference in my reports. For the thesis think I may highlight where I need to go back and do that to make sure they all get changed at the end.

I'm the complete opposite, I've done no work in a week and worse stillive barely thought about my Phd! No idea how I'm going to write up if this s my work motivation. Still had a nice break, managed to see lots of family and go running. I need to panic myself. note to self: "YOU ARE GOING TO A CONFERENCE NEXT WEEK AND NEED TO PRODUCE A POSTER!"