Aloha and Phdbug, please come back and give us an update on how it all went! As for me, the trains seem back to normal now, hooray! It's back to rainy and miserable in Newcastle again :-)

Crikey, it must be bad! Trains at the moment are being cancelled out of Kings X so it might be the case that I can't get down there anyway. And I really wanted 2 days away from the thesis...Boo!

That's all very well for you London types, but for us northerners trying to get to London for a conference tomorrow...:-s

Hi Sleepyhead,

Personally I'd say stick with the teaching if you want to go on to an academic career because the experience will be really beneficial. Plus if its a module you've done before the prep time should be lessened a little. But you need a good strategy for avoiding overload. Perhaps it would be worth drawing up a list of what has caused trouble this year and present it to the module leader/head of Dept before the module starts again next semester? It's also worth clarifying exactly what it is you have responsibility for - and if they're paying you the hourly rate for seminar/demonstrating it shouldn't be much. For example, our dept is always trying to palm stuff off on to the teaching assistants e.g. chasing up missing students, chasing up late essays, entering essay marks into the system etc etc and none of this is our responsibility, it is all the module leader's. So I have started to forward any email about this kind of stuff straight to the module leader and avoiding getting dragged in.

Alli - you could try getting a cheap 'dictionary of sociology' off amazon (or good 2nd hand bookshop if you're lucky enough to live near any). I've got the Collins one by Jary and Jary and it's great if you just need refreshing on the basics of a particular term. It's also good for finding out who are considered to be the main authors associated with a theory.

Hello & welcome to the forum!

Which subject area are you working in, as there seems to be quite a bit of variation between arts/sciences/social sciences as to the availability of formal 'postdoc' schemes/positions. I'll add my twopenneth for the social sciences - you could start by looking at the open schemes which are available, offered by the ESRC, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy (and probably tons of others - these are the major ones that spring to mind). To apply for these schemes you put together an application, identify a potential supervisor and if you are successful they give you money for a fixed period of time. There's some variation between the schemes, for example the ESRC postdoc fellowships don't allow you to do 'new' research - they are designed to help you get publications from your thesis. As such, they only last one year and your proposal needs to be based around what publications you intend to produce. Leverhulme and British Academy fund new research projects, usually 2-3 years. You identify a 'mentor' at a suitable university and outline your proposed project and the lucky few get funded. I won't go into any more detail in case you're not a social scientist and this is totally irrelevant :-)

There are also as you say vacancies on existing research projects for postdocs although I would have thought these would be advertised, rather than you needing to send speculative applications.

Good luck with your job search.

Hi Donzy,

Sorry to hear you're having a hard time. There's no real answer to your question - when do you know if you're good enough - in my opinion, but there are a few ideas to bear in mind. First off, you've just come out of 3/4 years of education where the main form of assessment is the essay. So you've spent the last 3/4 years perfecting how to write 3000 word answers to neat questions. A PhD is nothing like this. The questions are badly defined, if indeed you know what they are at all right now. The answer has to be 80,000+ words long. Go easy on yourself. It takes a long time to adjust to writing long chapters. Secondly, you're now doing a degree which has a lot of ridiculous ideas attached to it, such as "you have to be a genius to do a phd", "the thesis has to be perfect" and "a phd has to be completely original". It's really hard to ignore these kind of preconceptions and accept that you, too, are capable of achieving a phd. But I'd guess that pretty much no-one on this forum thinks a) they are a genius, b) their thesis is perfect or c) they have done something which no one else in the world has ever thought of doing before.

Like I said, I don't think there's an easy solution except keep writing (practice makes perfect), tell your supervisor how you feel (she might not realise you are in need of reassurance) and stick it out. Good luck!

Thanks for starting this thread, Liminalplace! I'm in my third year too and utterly sick of the whole damn thing. Confidence, morale, motivation and general feelings of ability at an all time low. BUT, I've got my trusty month-by-month plan and I'm going to stick at it. I love reading this forum and seeing that everyone goes through the same ups and downs and (usually) pulls through.

I did my interviews with civil servants in a government department and contacted almost all of them by email. I found that it was easiest to start with people who I had some connection with, however small - i.e. we had been at the same conference, or my supervisor had once met them. In some cases I did tell a little white lie, like if I knew we had been at the same conference I would say "It was great to meet you at x conference" as an opener because I knew they would not have the slightest recollection of whether they had actually met me before or not. Not to deceive them - just to establish a small mutual connection.

In the email I included a brief description of my research but focused on what I would like to ask them about in the interview. Tailor it as much as possible to the person you are contacting so that you can say "I would like to find out about your experiences of working on x policy" and show that you have found out a little bit about them beforehand. I also said something about confidentiality - i forget exactly how I worded it but something along the lines of the interview would be anonymous and they would be able to see any quotation used in the thesis.

Finally I would say contact at least twice as many people as you actually need to speak to, because a lot of people will ignore you. I don't think I got any refusals at all, but a lot of people simply didn't reply. You need to be quite brazen and if someone hasn't responded within a couple of weeks, email or write to them again. Also if you do an interview which goes well it always pays to ask the interviewee if they know anyone else you should speak to - if they personally recommend someone it gives you easy access to more participants and the word will spread within the organisation that you are "sound".

Good luck - I found contacting people the most nerve-wracking part of the process! The interviewing will be fine :-)

I've had some similar experiences, particularly regarding the sweeping generalisations and inappropriate remarks. Two recent ones which particularly stuck in my mind are "because the children come from single parent households they won't have been taught the right values which the rest of society holds" and "Because Bolivia is a small country it will not have a rich culture" (the student had inexplicably added a reference to the Lonely Planet website after that gem). I suppose I find remarks like those really strange as I count myself among a generation of children schooled to be politically correct (for want of a better phrase) and by extent, I assumed these younger students would be even more aware of the inappropriateness of racist/sexist etc remarks.

I do enjoy marking and as Ruby says, occasionally a really good essay will pop up which finds a new angle on an argument or has used an imaginative source which no one else has found. Our essays are submitted anonymously and I love opening them up after marking and seeing whether the gobby students were as good at writing as they are at speaking, and which of the quiet ones have been hiding their talents all term. The generally very dire standard of English language usage gets a bit wearing after a while but as the module leader reminded me, being a PhD student is - rightly or wrongly - about striving for perfection and it is unfair to expect undergraduates to have either the ability or desire to meet such high standards as the ones we apply to our own work.

Ah, thanks for that sleepyhead. He's not submitting til Feb so it's not desperately urgent but it is eerily quiet on the job front at the moment!

It's quite tense in my department too, because we're in the middle of a huge bust up about the appointment of 2 new chairs. I'm in a School of Agriculture but which has a significant marketing component, and the Business school is trying to poach the marketing staff to boost their own reputation. At the same time my own interdisciplinary research centre (within Agriculture) is being poached by the Humanities faculty. They want to appoint 2 new chairs - one in marketing, one for the research centre - to boost our standing but the funding for these chairs depends on the RAE result... complicated stuff! Needless to say everyone's in a right grump here because they don't know where they're going to be in 6 months time.

I'm hoping that the RAE will stimulate a raft of new job advertisements as well because my husband's looking for lectureships at the moment and there is *nothing* out there.

My publication route has been a bit like Sneaks' - although I don't know if you could call it "strategic"! My first three publications were a) co-authored with me as 1st author; b) co-authored with me as 2nd author and c) co-authored with me as 4th author. The one that was rejected was my first solo expedition which made it all the more painful! I also didn't have a choice as to the journal because it was going to be a special issue compiled from papers given at a particular conference.

I agree with Sneaks though - send stuff to the highest ranking journals possible, because you never know, it might get accepted. And if not you do get feedback (however harsh!).

Alicepalace - thanks for sharing your story and how wierd that they got in touch again out of the blue! Congratulations on getting published. I think I'll avoid telling my supervisor although he's friends with the person who was putting together the special issue so he might find out that way. I'll be practicing my breezy act in the meantime!

I think the way I arrived at my theoretical approach was quite similar to Chrisrolinksi's. From the outset I knew that I wanted to do my research in such a way that let people speak for themselves and did not try to impose 'rules' onto their behaviour but it wasn't until about a year in that I was reading a book on interpretive sociology and realised that was the label for what I was trying to do! I think I wrote a draft of my methods chapter in January of the second year so I guess that is when my 'theoretical framework' became fully formed. Having said that I still grapple with terminology now (third year) because my research is at the border of effectively four disciplines (politics, organizational studies, sociology of organizations and STS) and they all have different terms for very similar phenomenon! It's trick deciding whose terms to use because the labels you attach to yourself and your work (e.g. "I'm a political scientist" "This is a piece of science and technology studies") is very powerful in attracting or repelling other people from reading your work.

My supervisors have told me in the past that it's a good idea to choose an external who either myself or the supervisors have met before - if you appoint someone you've never met then you really are in the dark about their personality and it adds an unnecessary risk to the viva.

Opinion seems to be divided over whether you should go for the 'biggest ' name possible or for the most relevant person. My husband's supervisor (humanities subject) told him to pick a famous name because people will judge your thesis by who the examiner is, and you can ask the examiner for a supportive quotation to go on the back of your first book! In my subject (social sciences) I've never really heard people say that though.

As for quoting their work, I think you need to make a judgement as to why you have not quoted it, if you choose one of those examiners. Is it because it's irrelevant, because you were too lazy/fatigued to get any more books out of the library, because similar arguments had been made by someone else and you used their work instead? I can't imagine an examiner would pull you up in a viva for not quoting their work unless they were a total egotist!