Oh thank goodness for that! Well deserved. And you seriously deserve a medal for all that waiting. Enjoy the relief! :)

If your ultimate end goal is to achieve some kind of long term employment, then yes, this would be a waste of time. It would be unlikely to enhance your employability in academia (compared to, say, getting some papers/books published) and it would probably make you look unemployable to non-academic employers.

Sorry to be blunt, but I really can't see any merit in this route other than giving you something to do for three years.

Go ahead and apply. You might be given a conditional offer, you might lose out to people with completed Masters, but there's nothing to say that you can't apply, so long as you'd be available and finished the Masters by any specified start date.

If you know your supervisor's behaviour that well, and this is very atypical for him, then the chances are that he is maybe dealing with something very serious outside of work. Yes, this is a massive inconvenience for you, but you are not the only one of his responsibilities. Ideally he would be delegating, but life doesn't always afford us the chance to stay on top of everything when times are tough.

I echo advice above - leave him well alone, seek practical advice and raise your concerns via other channels, and don't develop resentment towards someone who may be having a very difficult time right now. I appreciate your frustration, but you should explore other avenues for getting advice on this from your university.

That sounds like something offered by a specific institution, rather than a generic type of scholarship, so it's hard to advise. It probably also depends on subject area.

I suspect that it might be quite competitive, so they would probably be looking for a good academic track record, and a commitment to postgraduate study/research. Same is probably true of any funding application though. Best advice is just to give it a try.

Fingers crossed it's good news and it's SOON.

You should add 'infinite patience' to the skills section of your CV.

I get paid nothing! Ah, the joys of getting 'experience' for your CV. But generally I think the going rate for teaching assistants if pay is available is between £10-£20. I don't know if the same applies if you're just doing marking without teaching.

Oh that's ridiculous. I'm so sorry you're going through this wait. It really is most unreasonable.

I'm glad you're getting interviews and having something else to focus on. I think you're doing the right thing by focussing on that.

But Grrrr! Not fun :-(

Some universities have a policy of not accepting work that was carried out before the start of the PhD as being valid for your thesis. How far developed are your ideas?

Certainly it is something that could be the subject matter for a paper. It may be that, on its own, it might not be enough material for a PhD thesis. That said, it could be a good starting point e.g. present this model and then test its applicability with case studies or something.

As a word of caution, if you think you've come up with something really great, be cautious about sharing it around, particularly if you're not yet affiliated with an institution. It may be best to identify an existing PhD project that's being advertised, which is flexible enough to give you scope to incorporate these ideas into the project.

Oops! Sorry for the slightly redundant advice!

I haven't got to the job hunting stage yet, but there are several posters on here who will be able to sympathise with your circumstances, having had similar experiences. One issue that does come up is whether you are better off removing the PhD entirely from your CV and describing that period as 'Research Assistant' or similar.

I'm not actually a techie but I wonder if you'd find something in the page's source code (e.g. if you use Firefox, right click and go to 'View Page Source'. I don't know whether that would be robust enough evidence though.

Well whenever a forum I use gets changed my initial reaction is usually "Gagh!" and then eventually I get over it. :)

User names could be a bit more prominent but I get when people start using avatars it'll become clearer who's who.

An easy way to jump to the latest post on a thread before you go into the thread would be handy (i.e. when viewing the list of threads, I was expecting that if I clicked on 'latest post' it would take me there, but instead it gives me the profile of the last poster, which isn't terribly useful (if I want to know that I'll access that from one of their actual posts).

The 'abuse' button still amuses me - whenever I click it I'm half expecting a stream of auto-generated invectives to appear. ;-)

I can't say I miss the old colour scheme - it was a bit too candy-sickly for my liking, plus a bit garish for those surreptitious procrastination moments in an open plan office! This is much cleaner.

Hazy

Both my PhD experiences have involved faculty level induction/welcome/training type things covering some, but not all, of the key points you mention. I do think it's important.

Regarding the journal vs conference proceeding issue, I think it's usually assumed that you will have either got to grips with this via prior studies, or seek out some kind of library skills type thing. Whenever I've heard talks from librarians, they're always saying, "Come to us if you need to learn how to make best use of resources." They can be an untapped source of wisdom. Tt_dan, I wonder if it would help if you checked whether your uni library had a subject specific librarian you could talk to, or any courses/sessions on making best use of resources?