Thank you very much for your input. I take your advice on board, and I accept that I shall not do anything that may compromise my PhD.

Greetings Faust! I don't subscribe to this notion that PhDers should be nailed to their desks. It's absolutely essential to take time off. I can't argue enough for this. If you go hell for leather, you'll go to the dark side. I've seen it happen so often. Go for it Faust!

Rarely seen so much crap advice than on this thread.

Holidays are extremely important. Only with a fresh mind and soul one can produce the best results. Without a number of very long breaks (6 weeks) over the summer and two weeks holiday at Christmas and 2 weeks skiing at Easter time I probably wouldn't have completed my PhD and ended up in a mental health unit. All this crap about "PhD students have no holidays" will only make you sick or ill, and no intelligent supervisor would seriously demand it from a student.

I completely agree with the last couple of posts - it is absolutley essential to have time off during your PhD. I do labwork and took a month off at the end of my 1st year to go to New Zealand (had been saving for a VERY long time) as that seemed like the best time to do it - my supervisor was absolutely fine with it as he was happy with progress. Took a few weeks off last summer but will not take much this time round as it's my final year. Do what you want with the time you have free - don't feel like you HAVE to work all the time, or you will go crazy. For a cheap getaway, maybe around Europe? Go with friends and relax - you need to forget completely about your work sometimes, you will feel much better to tackle it after. A PhD is not all doom and gloom, I say go for it! ;)

I agree with what's been said before, I think it's very different across the various academic disciplines. I know that of the PhD students I'm studying with, very few of them work anything like full time and all take holidays of 2, 3 or 4 weeks in the summer. Now maybe I'm just studying with the laziest PhD students in the country, but there are certain situations where doing a PhD doesn't mean working 9-5 for three years (I'm doing politics incidentally).

I completely agree guys: you have to take a break! You really can't work non-stop. Besides, I find that after a set amount of time I stop concentrating anyway and if I carry on just get completely fed up and stop. I've read it on here numerous times before that a PhD is like a marathon and you have to pace yourself. And do I agree!

If you read back over this thread, I think the issue here was not whether it was okay to take a break, which is obviously essential, but whether taking the entire summer off was a good idea, which it cleary isn't ...

Just what I was going to say belisarius - taking a few weeks off isn't the same as the three-month undergrad summer

I agree with the last two posts. I don't accept that any healthy adult "needs" (as opposed to "wants") a six week holiday in the summer.

Ah, so Faust has stated that he/she wishes to have a Summer holiday of around 6 weeks duration? How long is a holiday in the Summer? I think I should have politely asked first. Thanks for orientating me to the true issue of the thread though.

I don't think Faust did; he/she just queried the typical holiday length (fair question cos most people, when they start, don't realise that postgrad and undergrad holidays are different). Someone else said that they needed a 6-week break, which made me laugh out loud.

Actually Faust, you may be able to take a summer break of sorts if you go for some kind of European exchange programme; some of our postgrads have spend a month in a lab in Germany, France and Italy.

as for the original question - which was actually not if it is ok to take time off or not, at all, it was about what to do - i'd suggest, if you are taking time off, to do something totally un-related to your PhD. my favourite is always a cycle tour, that's cheap and can be any length of time from 3 days to 3 months. and you can stop whenever you've had enough. if it needs to be really cheap, start from right where you are. else, you can go somewhere specific, for example follow the danube, or the atlantic coast, or finland, or or or...

plan some time for getting back into your topic after an extended time away from it. but also, this fresh view might prove an advantage!