I agree with TreeofLife - if you're interested in the research and there's a good environment and you're happy to be there, then you already have a huge advantage. One thing I would check out (from my own experience) is what your full funding at A entails, just so you know up front. In my case, I had a university scholarship which covered my fees and monthly bursary, but absolutely no money towards the running costs of my research or conferences. People I know who were research council funded had extra money for these things. I wouldn't base your decision on that necessarily, but it is important to know how you're going to pay for study costs - I didn't even realise at the start that there was no money I could access!

It may be worth considering things like university/departmental conferences and seminars, and how you would contribute to those (e.g. organising or presenting), and things that might be available within the department - PhD student meetings or committees, research groups, informal ways of sharing info and networking and so on. I guess you could stress your commitment to sharing information and expertise, finding connections with others' research, that sort of thing.

That is a bit of an ambiguous question! If I got that at interview, I would probably start by trying to clarify whether the panel literally meant community as in the university or department community, or whether they were defining 'people with PhDs' as some kind of bigger community. It is hard to know from the question whether you're meant to answer it in terms of your interpersonal skills or whether they're looking for the type of PhD contribution you would make! Where did the question come from?

I know - one minute you have three years to immerse yourself in a topic, the next it's the end and you're scrabbling around trying to get it finished!

Thanks for the tip, Tudor_Queen - I have also had that sinking feeling when I've thought I had sent something to a whole group of unintended recipients - it doesn't help that the program defaults to 'reply all'!

Wow, 73% is great! I've only got about 40% of mine down so far, but there are reasons for that (on-going data collection holding up the findings chapters, grrrr). Like you say though, it is good to see how much of the whole you've done - one thing I like to do is divide the words to write by the rough number of working days I have left - it makes it all look so much more manageable!

I'd heard that the key findings/contribution to knowledge should be up front and central at the start of the thesis - has anyone else been told that? I'm wondering about putting it in the introduction, as cringeworthy as it seems to do that! I guess it will be in the abstract in summary form too!

It might be worth checking with your supervisor re. bullet pointed lists - I'd been told to avoid them and forgot that and included some in a chapter, so have predictably been told to take them out!

My PhD was competition funded as TreeofLife describes - the university has to decide whether to fund the project as well as the candidate. Good luck!

My day has not been the most productive either. Oh well, onwards and upwards tomorrow, eh?

Hope you had a good birthday, Zutterfly!

I'm working on a findings chapter and doing analysis/writing for it in tandem - it is my 'big brute' of a chapter and is definitely going to take me longer than planned! However, I have been telling myself that once this one is out of the way, everything else will seem slightly more manageable in comparison, so I'm trying to hold on to that.

I'd probably report it to Facebook in the first case and see if that's an end to it. As well as reporting the abusive messages, it's possible to report people having accounts under different names (a friend of mine used a false name with very good reason, and was hounded by Facebook after someone reported her). Hopefully what happened was a one-off as a result of whatever was going on in her life that night, but I agree with you that there are some unhealthy signs there. If there's any further negative contact from her, I would take it further at that stage.

The closer I get to the end of my funded period, the more I think I am going to be combining working and doing the final tweaks to my thesis anyway! I know everyone's different, but I've discovered it actually makes me feel better about it to think that I don't have this huge set-in-stone date ahead of me, so I think I'm going to concentrate on getting all the chapters written and then see what happens with the timing for doing final edits etc.