Just to add, living in the City (even the Western edge) will be expensive as will the commute.

If you are going to be at Brunel, avoid living in the City, it's a unnecessary expense. Uxbridge is not a bad place to live and there are good train/tube links to get into central quickly. Areas surrounding Uxbridge are not too bad, like Hayes. You could do a quick commute from somewhere like Harrow.

Have a search of estate agents to get an idea of price.

I agree with coastie. Science is mostly badly paid (for the amount you do) and well paid is competitive, therefore you need to do something that you enjoy or at least can put up with happily.

I suggest moving out of science if jobs are a problem.

Agree with above, it's never to early, the more you get down early on (especially the expt stuff - diagrams etc that take ages to format), less to forget. Even if you change direction and have to re-write your lit review, it's not a bad thing.

I'm suprised your supervisor told you to leave it until the end, I think the best thing would be to write up as you go along. Then at the end you have most of it written up (if not all of it) leaving only for editing etc.

I don't see how I was being rude, I simply asked the poster to stop posting the same thing again and again on different threads. Then I also mentioned why I couldn't help and why most of us wouldn't be able to help, this being a UK-based forum.

Can you please stop repeatedly posting the same thread?

I would answer you but I have no idea how GPA converts on the UK system. There are some other people on the forum who might know, including some US people but most of us are based in the UK.

If you supervisor is well known in the field, I don't see anything wrong with them emailing these academics and saying "My PhD student is working on blah and needs blah " etc.

Well known academics get 100's of emails daily, most of which are crap and they can be quite brutal (have to be - due to time constraints) about going through and using the delete button.

Did you have a clear subject heading on these emails? You also have to remember, the emails we get on this forum from foreign students asking for funding etc are also received by well known people in their fields. Even I get them and I'm just a lowly PhD student.

We can all help you look after her, I'll have her tomorrow

PowerPoint is much better for drawing flowcharts than Word!

If you don't want to re-draw, do the grouping thing, copy the whole lot, then do a paste special in powerpoint and paste as a picture, should work perfectly but the quality wont be the same.

Best thing to do is ask to have a meeting with her to discuss her comments/corrections of that piece of work. You can then say, I'm a little confused here (here, here, here, here and here) by what you meant as I haven't actually written that. ETC

Good luck

In my department we have a peer review system, even for research students taking on teaching duties. You go and sit in a tutorial/lab demo for a colleague and they do the same for you and then swap comments on teaching style etc (using guidelines). It's all very formal, has to be written up properly and sent off (God knows who to).

Andy, what's the PhD about?

Was suprised as I also thought Claire would win but glad it was Lee rather than "I'm only 24" Alex or boring "me to death" Helene.

MS Visio is quite decent if you can get hold of a copy.