No idea. I'm in a similar position - waiting to hear if I will get a Masters studentship. My view is that there is nothing I can do to change whatever things they look at (e.g. degree class) so best just to forget about it! Am assuming I won't get it and saving accordingly, so if I do it will be a pleasant bonus. Just keep working hard, get the best grades you can, write the best application you can, and that's all you can do.

Actually the smart thing for all of us to do is stick in academia for the next 3-4 years using existing funding that can't be taken away from PIs. And then when the academic sector starts to suffer (e.g. Wellcome have slashed their research budget by £30m) in terms of future grants, we'll all have to decamp to the private sector, which will hopefully have recovered by then. :(

Sometimes it's good to show that you've actually considered that what you plan is realistic in the time available. Your current timetable is a bit vague in this regard though, so I'd either ditch it, or make it more thorough!

If you replaced it with a Gantt chart, how would that affect your word count?

Go for the funding. QMUL did well in the RAE, and being able to put on your CV that you were funded to do a Masters looks good in its own right.

You have my sympathies. I left my PhD just short of two years in, so I can imagine how you feel right now.

You need to spend a lot of time thinking about this and considering your options. Here are specific things you need to answer for yourself:
1. What exactly is it that you don't like about what you're doing?
2. If there are problems with your project, are the insurmountable? Are you sure you couldn't sort them out?
3. What sort of thing would you rather be doing instead (assuming no external restrictions)
4. How likely is it to be able to pursue the alternative in the current climate
5. What are your long term career goals and how might this impact upon them?

In my case, my project had major problems and was seriously behind schedule. I had lost interest in the work and in fact had identified a different field I wanted to work in. The relationship with one of my supervisors was terrible (I look back on it as the most miserable working environment I've ever been in). The idea of spending another two years there just filled me with dread.

I'd had a bit of a wobble a few months earlier and thought about leaving. But then I'd decided to keep going for a bit longer, with the plan to get the PhD finished and then change fields. I threw myself into the project, but the problems remained. So when a second major wobble came along, I figured it was time to go and stop enduring this highly negative experience, and pursue something different. Although this made the process more protracted, it did mean that second time around I was as sure as I could be that this was really what I had wanted, as I had given it a seriously good try. I would recommend this approach e.g. carry on your work as normal but spend a week/month/whatever with the mindset of 'I'm leaving' and then spend an equal period with the mindset of 'I'm staying and will finish this' - then see how you feel about each period.

Do talk to people. Unless you have problems with your supervisor(s), do consider raising it with them, and/or a graduate tutor. Talk to other PhD students - you may 'just' have the fairly common 'second year blues'. And if you do plan to move on, get some decent, realistic careers advice. Before I told my supervisor I wanted to leave, I went to see I guy I knew who worked in the field I wanted to move into. He gave me a lot of reassurance that I wouldn't, in this case, be an academic pariah, and a few days later offered me the opportunity to work for him. So leaving my PhD wasn't a leap into the unknown as I already had something else lined up.

All the best with your decision

HazyJane

PS. For the record, I haven't regretted it for a second.

If you're from a developing country, try here:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Biomedical-science/Grants/Fellowships-and-personal-awards/Public-health-and-tropical-medicine/index.htm

Whilst I appreciate that your financial situation is a concern, if I had another 7 months to play with and my thesis was anything less than perfect, I'd carry on working with it. Yes, it's perfectly common to come away from a viva with corrections to do prior to a PhD being awarded, but if there are clear issues you could work on prior to submission I imagine that the examiners would look more favourably on your work. If I had to examine a thesis that needed further development, and then found out that it had been submitted really early, I don't think I'd be too impressed.

If you are of the opinion that making the necessary changes/developments to your thesis aren't that big a deal (although check with your supervisor about this), then would it be possible to get at least some kind of small part time job, just to keep things ticking over and help prevent more debt mounting up, while you work on those issues?

Finally, I think in a way the fact that the expected time for a PhD project is three year is not just reflective of the fact that it takes (at least) that long for most people to do enough tangiable work to put down on paper. Certainly for me I would say that I need time to absorb information and synthesise it into something cohesive - you might find that by submitting early you may be depriving your thesis of some insight that you haven't yet made.

Just a thought.

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And the moral of this story is never try to do a poorly-conceived poll around a bunch of PhD students, as they will tear apart your methodology and response categories.

(I thought it was just me that found the question clearly weighted and the option likely to exclude a lot of people!)

I found that if they definitely didn't want you they told you within days. 'Reserve list' suggests to me that they've offered it to another candidate and are waiting for an acceptance/rejection before they offer it to you. So you're at the mercy of the decision making abilities of another student unfortunately!

I found that my interviews skills got better as I went along and so too did my success rate - first one was an outright rejection, second I'm pretty sure was shortlisted (they never said that officially, but it took them a while to get back to me and I felt that it had gone well) and then I got lucky with the third one. So just be patient with your outstanding offers, look on it as learning experience, and focus on the next interview. If the shortlisted places ultimately reject you, ask for feedback to see whether there is anything you could have done differently to make yourself the first choice candidate.

Good luck! :-)

Have you identified a supervisor? Potential project? I don't know how the DEL works but if it's like other research councils then funding will either be attached to a specific project for which you have to apply, or you come up with a proposal yourself, with the backing of a supervisor, and then apply for funding. They won't just give you funding to go and do a PhD in the same way that they did your MRes.

I guess having been funded before proves that you are fundable, and as long as you do well in the MRes might give you the edge over another candidate who hasn't been funded before.

Whatever the situation is, reconcile yourself to the fact that, unless you apply for a predefined funded PhD project, you might not be going straight from MRes into PhD. Funding councils make their decisions at specified times of the year, and applications take a while to put together, so you need to be prepared for some kind of time lag.

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Ah it wasn't the PMU bit I was talking about - look in the left hand menu at the bit that says 'search our housing database'. There's always places on there (including some currently that fit your budget/transport requirements), but the list gets really long sometime in about May when landlords list their places open from June/September.

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UoL have a housing database here: http://housing.london.ac.uk It doesn't have much on it at the moment but I think early May is when they publish a big list of properties let by approved landlords. If you're looking at other sources of private sector accommodation I wouldn't bother contacting landlords until a month or two before you plan to move.

Good transport links are far more important than overall distance. Don't rule out rail travel either. If, say you were at King's Strand campus, the journey from parts of zone 3/4 to Charing Cross/Waterloo is only 20-30 minutes by train.

How would you feel about sharing a bathroom/kitchen? I've been looking on gumtree myself for studios and I've noticed that there are cheaper ones to be had if you are willing to share some facilities.

It's far less intuitive to use than Word (i.e you'll need to go on a course/read a manual) but produces better results.

Word is really designed for writing letters - it's not built to deal with massive documents. In LaTex if you put a table in a particular place, with margins defined, it'll stay there, rather than developing a mind of its own. If you change the order of subsections, the numbering will get updated automatically. It doesn't try to auto format things. In short, it produces a far more stable, more attractive document. But it is a bit more of a challenge to use, and you'll want to use it from an early stage in your writing, because if you just paste a load of stuff from Word you will lose the formatting you've already done (bold, italics etc) as it has a different way of doing it.

1. Go to your GP and don't solicit medical advice from strangers on the net
2. Ask the supervisors of the projects in question. Be honest about the amount of experience you have and what you would hope to achieve.
3. Depends entirely on your field and what kind of work you want to go in to. What kind of jobs have you been looking at?

Sorry to be unhelpful but two of the questions you ask are beyond the scope of people here to answer, and the third doesn't give enough detail for us to help you.