It's quite unusual to be signed up automatically for these types of things, and certainly not in the spirit of the PhD to take charge of a students own time-management!

Unless your 'brief discussion' 6 months ago led your supervisor to believe that this is something you wanted to partake in. Why not ask your supervisor if these are mandatory (unless you want to do them, of course, in which case just do them!)?

The pay will vary from university to university, and even from activity to activity. I believe lab demonstrations at my University are around £20 an hour, whereas tutorial sessions, invigilating and marking are probably between £10 and £15 an hour. Not bad for an hour's work to be fair, and can certainly make a considerable boost for your annual income on top of your stipend.

Unfortunately universities also often place a limit on the numbers of hours per week that you can dedicate to such activities, your thesis is more important, afterall. Not entirely sure of the limit, this will probably vary between universities too. Probably no more than 5 or 6 sessions per week.

It'll probably just be named after whoever first describes the new physics, or named appropriately to however the theory works!

Personally, I'd call it something whacky, because I'm quirky like that. Or, just to enrage the battles between theists and atheists further, call it God Theory :D.

I think measurement error is probably ruled out.

The speed of light is invariant in all reference frames.

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The results were statistically significant, and I trust that the boys at CERN have done a lot of work in documenting the possible causes and ruling them out (or factoring them in appropriately to the error model).

There could be multiple explanations. I personally like the idea that the neutrinos are not breaking the universal speed limit, but were in fact just taking a short cut (through another dimension, as would be allowable in the many competing string theories, and others).

Time will tell whether the results are accurate and what the cause of the results is, but if the results are confirmed, it won't immediately suggest that Einstein is totally wrong. Clearly Einstein's work is completely correct, as we've been using it for almost a century with great success. If the results are confirmed, it will probably only mean that although Einstein's work is correct, it is not as universal as we used to think, and Einstein's work will prove to be a limited version of a more elaborate theory.

This is what we seen with Newtonian physics. It's not that Relativity proved Newtonian physics to be wrong... Newtonian physics is still correct, and engineers and scientists like myself still use it to great effect to design the vast majority of things that fuel our societies - aircraft, spacecraft, cars, buildings, bridges, infrastructure, etc. It was simply the case that Newtonian physics applied in a more limited sense to the Universe as a whole than we used to think. Newtonian physics is a special case of Einsteinian physics, and if the neutrino results are confirmed, in all likeliood it will be the case that Einsteinien physics is a special case of a new era of more elaborate physics.

So nobody has to worry that Evolution is next!!!

... although I must admit, I'm half hoping that some intern did the calculations and was using imperial units instead of metric or something, just for the sheer hilarity and the opportunity to create yet another anecdote to warn undergraduates about the perils of units!

Are you sure about this? Is there any other source for a freeze other than your letter? Most adverts I see for PhD positions with attached EPSRC stipend state that it is reviewed annually and subject to inflationary variation, and that has been the case up until this year, and there doesn't seem to be any indication from a quick google search that they intend not to review it annually in the coming years.

There is no end as to how pissed off I'll be if they decide to cut the inflationary variation the year I start... and they'll probably resume it the year I finish! ARGH!

I despise the UK sometimes.

I completely agree with what you're saying. I haven't even started yet and I'm already quite frustrated with how under-valued PhD students are in society, and have become quite deflated when I think about how long it's going to be before there's any sort of respect, financial reward, status reward and security reward for the many long years of solid work I've put in.

The stipend isn't terrible... it compares favourably with the average graduate salaries once you include income tax, national insurance contributions, council tax, and other things we don't need to concern ourselves with that people who go into graduate jobs do, and I suppose there are opportunities to make a bit of extra cash through teaching/tutoring/lab demonstrations/invigilation, etc, but still, it's not a huge deal.

The country's attitude to research and those who conduct it and train in it is appalling.

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Haha, tell me about it! This is my first year, so in the lead up I reviewed the past minimum payments and they all went up by £300 each year without fail, so I figured it was a safe bet that I'd be getting £13,890 this year! But no, stuck at £13,590!

Hopefully they go up by more than £300 next year to make up for it... otherwise I'll be losing out all 3 years!

Oh dear, this thread frightens me!

I'm just about to start my PhD. I live with my girlfriend of 3 and a half years (just moved in) and our relationship is very serious - for all intents and purposes, we are practically married, in terms of how we view our relationship.

Like I said, I'm just about to begin my PhD, the funding for which ends at the end of September 2014, and I fully intend to complete the PhD before the funding is through. My girlfriend is in her 3rd year of her 5 year undergraduate degree (we're both in Engineering!), so she should graduate around July 2014. So I suppose the good news is that we both graduate around the same time, so there's some degree of flexibility in how we can organise our lives after University.

At the moment, it's my intention to stay in academia, but I'm not entirely sure. I did ask my research group at my PhD interview what the likelihood was that I would be offered a post-doc if I was successful enough in my PhD, and the answer was positive... many of the staff, themselves, did their PhDs at the University (or at another one in the same city) and many of their current post-docs literally just finished their PhDs within the research group, so the evidence is there to suggest that they're keen on hanging on to good researchers!

I hope I get offered a post-doc there, and also that my girlfriend finds a job in the same city. That would be the simplest scenario!

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Hi Mensageiro.

Sorry to hear about your funding.

I don't see any problem with contacting multiple academics in the same departments. The fact that they work in the same departments suggests that their research is related and overlaps, which means it's no surprise that your own research interests match up with more than one of these academics.

They are professional people, so I imagine they understand and don't get petty when competing for PhD students.

Personally, I applied for a scholarship at a University which covered various possible projects between two supervisors. They were so impressed by me that they both offered my their projects, meaning I was in a very fortunate position of having to choose between two academics who know each other, work in the same research group, and continuously conduct research together.

Neither academic was bitter. They both sat down with me at the same time, we discussed the ins and outs of each project at length, and they made me very comfortable by enforcing the idea that my choice should be about which project appealed to me most, and not about which of them wanted me most, etc.

Hope this helps.

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The general rule of paying off debt is that you ALWAYS pay off the debt which has the highest interest first.

Now, student loans do have interest, but they're set in such a way that, each year, the interest rate is less than or equal to the rate of inflation. This means that the total cost of borrowing if 0 (or less than 0!). i.e. you may take out a loan for £10,000, and in 10 years time you need to pay back £13,000, but this extra money is due to inflation... i.e. when you originally took out the loan, £10,000 might have bought you 1,000 trips to the supermarket, and 10 years ahead, to buy the same 1,000 trips to the supermarket, you'd need £13,000. So if you have ANY other debt at all (private loans, career development loans, car finance, mortgage, credit cards, overdrafts, etc), chances are that the interest on this debt is a lot higher than the interest on the student loan.

But even if you have no other debt at all, I'd still advise against paying off the student loan before you have to, the reason being that you can be more wise with your spare cash in other ways which make you better off in aggregate. For example, the interest on your student loan is often a lot less than the interest you get in a decent savings account. So if you have a spare £100 say, you would, in aggregrate, have a lot more money in the future if you put this money in a savings account than if you used it to pay off your student loan.

You can verify this by a simple calculation, taking into consideration that the current student loan interest rate is 1.1%, whilst you can easily find savings accounts with interest rates of 2.8% and upwards. The get more from the savings account interest per year than you save yourself by paying off the student loan.

On that basis, I'd say, do NOT pay off your student loan until you have to, and even when you have to, only pay the minimum and don't make extra payments until you're near the end of your repayments and just want to get it over and done with (this leaves you with more money to invest in things which give you a more money than you would save by paying off your student loan with it).

Even if your loan is so big that the minimum payment will mean you're paying it off for the whole 30 years, you still win! After 30 years, the loan gets scrapped, and if you've only paid off half (with interest included) that means you got 1,000 supermarket trips for the price of 500. And if your loan is that big, then any payments you make towards it from your stipend will probably be negligible anyway!

Hope this helps.

Of course, I'm assuming you're in the UK where this is all true. I'm not sure how student loans work elsewhere.

Nope, I wasn't really banking on buying a new car, just been looking at used ones. I didn't think the companies did their own finance though? I've been going through Arnold Clark, and when you ask for finance with them, they send your application off to more than 40 finance companies until you get approval. Unfortunately, each and every one rejected me!

I'll look into Toyota though, but my purpose in creating this thread was more to have a general rant about how PhD students are viewed, rather than me complaining about not being able to get a car!

Thanks for the reply skig.

I didn't really have grand plans as such. I just had the notion in my head that I would be recognised as somebody who has elevated past undergraduate studies, and that the distinction would be made between undergraduate student and postgraduate research student for the purposes of securing finance, etc.

I'm aware that things don't come in a silver plate, but I'm not asking for much. My classmates who got graduate jobs will be getting finance for things far more expensive and superior to the things that I want, and will be getting it. I'm not interested in getting anything flashy - at the moment I'd just like a car that isn't a deathtrap, but I can't even get £5,000 finance for that.

For the record I'm not interested in a Ferrari.

Thanks for your reply Flack.

You're probably right about the credit think. My theory is that it's a combination of me having nothing to secure the loan against and not having enough missed payments in my history. If the credit was given to me, the finance company would stand to make £900 over 3 years in the very likely event that I would make all my payments. However, if I had a poorer history of making payments, and secured the finance against a mortgaged home, then they'd probably take me on in an instant, secure in the knowledge that they'll probably get to repossess something of mine eventually and make far more than the mere £900.

My particular field is one that is suffering least from the financial crisis, and there's a strong graduate-job market still out there, so a lot of my classmates who left with even quite poor degrees (2:2 and below) are finding it easy to go into employment with big-name companies, on handsome starting salaries and golden handshakes. By my calculations, once you factor in all the things you've mentioned (income tax, council tax, student loan repayments, national insurance, etc) then my graduate-job classmates and I are probably on equal footing where take-home income is concerned, which is why it's so frustrating that the finance companies see things differently, simply because I have the word 'student' on my application form. Although I do realise that in 3 years time, I could probably join my classmate's companies on a higher salary and at a higher organisational position than them, and am of course, grateful for that.

In terms of relying on my parents, I don't actually need to rely on them for actual cash, just for their credit histories (in fact, my parents have terrible credit histories, so I'm actually having to rely on other family members, not them specifically). It's just a little deflating to have gotten this far and not have anybody outside my friends, family, and academic circles recognising it, and the business world still seeing me as a liability that needs some sort of adult supervision stepping in to cover my back.

I guess I was just under the impression that my days of 'barely surviving, and only through the help of parents' were over, and am a little disappointed to find out I'm quite wrong, at least where obtaining credit is concerned.

[quote]Quote From flack:

GSM: I would try not to take the credit issue too personally. It could be that at your age you simply don't have much of a credit history at all- never mind that it's good, credit providers can be overly cautious, most even more so now the banks have seen where offering sub-prime mortgages got them. It is also possible to have too good a credit history- though they'll rarely admit it, lenders like to take on more "profitable" customers. Asking for a guarantor for a flat is standard practise, and thanks to this whole credit crunch thing we're having even people with well-paid jobs are struggling to get credit. Just be happy you're not trying to get a mortgage in this climate...

The "real job" thing is something that I, as an older aspiring PhD student who has had several "real jobs", find hard to relate to. I've just gone from working on a fascinating and fulfilling MSc lab project with an amazing supervisor who gave me a great deal of autonomy and confindence in myself as an independent researcher to a blistering dull call centre job where that my confidence is being sapped by bosses who micromanage the staff to within an inch of our lives. The pay also isn't that great, and unlike a PhD student I have to pay income tax, council tax, and national insurance, and with the rising costs of food and energy what I have left doesn't go very far. Again you should consider yourself lucky here: your fellow classmates will be struggling over the shortage of graduate jobs and having the same problems as you, only to a greater extent

Thanks for your reply. Again, I hope I'm not coming across like I'm not ecstatic about the opportunity I've gotten for myself here. I am, very much so, and I'm not disillusioned as to what significance it has and what it will do for my prospects in the future.

I was just hoping, I guess, that being a PhD student would have more standing in society in terms of financial standing and security than an undergraduate. And in monetary terms, it does, because clearly I'll be on almost 3 times as much money as I was as an undergraduate. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.

Is there any particular logic behind that rule of your? Okay, everybody is different, and everybody will be going down different paths, but isn't ignoring the alternatives to your own choices just denial?

You say that a PhD is vocational, meaning long hours and little pay, but I don't really think it is little pay. Maybe I have lower criteria for what counts as 'high pay' because of my background, but the money I'll be on as a PhD student doesn't seem insignificant at all, which is why I'm frustrated that the rest of the planet doesn't recognise that, and makes no distinction between me, now, as a PhD student on a generous stipend, and me, 6 month ago, an undergraduate student struggling to get by on less than half the salary of a person on minimum wage.

I'm not asking the world to revolve around me. I'm not talking about me specifically, but PhD students in general. Unless, of course, the rest of you have some way to avoid the aspersions that are cast on us that I just don't know about.

I'm ecstatic about my undergraduate degree and even moreso about the opportunity to do a PhD! I hope I don't come across as ungrateful in that respect, because I certainly am!

The problem seems to be that everything DOES arrive on a silver platter all at once, but just not until you've gotten your PhD and have a full-time job that doesn't count as 'full-time education'. I would prefer it if it was more incremental than it seems to be, that's the issue!

And a ferrari? Really? I don't recall seeing an academic drive anything flashier than a BMW :P.