To kick off....

I use MS Office for...the usual

Stata for data analysis (will probably also use MLwin and maybe R at some point)

Mendeley for managing paper references

Zotero as an enhanced bookmarking tool to save links/webpages (I know it can be used for bibliographies too but I prefer the Mendeley interface)

And good ol' pen and paper for note making and recording my ideas. Probably sounds daft but I can't think without a pen in my hand.

There are often threads on here asking for advice on specific software packages - sometimes ones that are completely new to me! I thought it might be interesting to share what we use on a regular basis. Partly to find out what's out there, and partly to see who uses the same things as you and might be able to help...

On both of these it says an honours degree:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/prospectus/course/1087/entry/
http://courses.leedsmet.ac.uk/biomedicalsciences_msc

Which is a 3 year bachelors degree passed to a sufficiently high standard to award honours. I can't see any reference to a 4 year degree.

If you have any concerns about whether your qualifications are suitable you should contact the admissions office of the university or a course tutor for the masters programme.

For those into the 80s, this parody of Total Eclipse of the Heart might hit the spot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEDhFfgdOo

(The cat is not integral to proceedings - seems to be some way of getting around copyright issues).

Academic public health jobs would be advertised places like www.findauniversityjob.com and jobs.ac.uk

Practitioner jobs may require you to have proper accreditation with the Faculty of Public Health (http://www.fph.org.uk/). If your PG Cert is an academic qualification rather than a practice based training qualification, you may wish to consider applying for their (paid) training scheme.

The Health Protection Agency might be another good place to look, especially if you have an interest in communicable disease: http://www.hpa.org.uk/

Other than that, maybe look at more general sites like The Guardian and local authority websites. My suspicion is that you would be looking at entry level posts as more senior posts probably require higher qualifications or previous experience.

Hmmm - sometimes things don't do what they say on the tin! And I do think it's worth giving it a shot. But job hunting can be generally dispiriting anyway, so I don't think it's wise to let rejections from jobs for which one is not well matched to the job spec get to you too much. Better to save the emotional energy for something else.

Oh dear. No more ideas I'm afraid - unless maybe it's worth a shot to just paste into a new word doc to see if you can get rid of some rouge code. If it's any consolation I've found Endnote and Reference Manager to be more buggy than Mendeley.

Hope you find a solution.

Have you deleted all pointers to that reference in the text?

Failing that, I'd try the Mendeley support pages.

Click on the add-ins tab in Word and hit refresh. It might reformat your bibliography in the default style but you can change that.

Firstly - just to check, are you paying for this or your dept? Ideally it should be the latter if it is for PhD work - there *should* be money allocated for such things. If it is the latter you may have your choices limited by university procurement contracts. In my uni it is a choice between Macs or Dells. So check that out before you spend hours researching your options.

I've had good experiences with Dell, and I like the fact that you can custom build according to your needs. When you say 'large databases', how large is large? You may find that with very large datasets, a laptop won't rapidly be able to undertake some analyses, so you might want to enquire whether provision is made in your department for access to more powerful desktops. Or at least ensure that your laptop spec is optimised for that. I use a Dell desktop at work, so I can't make specific recommendations with regard to models I'm afraid.

In summary:
You worked really hard this year... you allowed yourself just a week off to recover...now you're beating yourself up for the fact that your body/mind maybe need a little bit more time to regroup?

Sound like a classic case of PhD guilt.

You can't afford a holiday, but you can afford the yoga, ice cream, naps and walks in the sun. I would suggest enjoying the restorative effects of those properly and giving yourself a few more day respite before trying to get back into the swing of things.

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While I appreciate the job market is tough, I do wonder to what extent the barrier to finding a non-academic job post PhD partly consists of lack of marketing of transferrable skills/putting the emphasis in the wrong place on job applications.

While admittedly the prospects in my field are comparatively good, both in and out of academia, I have no illusions about the fact that the PhD is not going to be the only thing that matters on my CV. I think it's possible to get so absorbed in the pursuit of it that one can lose sight of how much it means to other people compared to how much it means to you. In my head I imagine prospective employers looking at my CV, seeing a PhD and thinking 'Well, good for you, but what can you offer us?'

If I haven't got a postdoc job/fellowship lined up for when I finish, I intend to apply for relevant non-academic jobs pretty much in parallel to my academic applications, rather than waiting until I've had months of academic rejections etc. I think some flexibility of outlook is probably best.

Just my (possibly naive) thoughts though - interested in what other people think.

I hope your friend finds something that is appropriate to her skills and interests. It is a worry if you are the first person to suggest these options to her. Postgrad careers advice seems to be patchy - very focussed on how to market yourself for a career in academia but not enough support if that doesn't work out.

There are a couple of different approaches you could take but first question to help us help you is: what is your deadline? How long to do you have allocated for this project. Because that will determine what kind of question you can realistically address.