Well firstly, I imagine you could have gone to another university and started the MPhil if that is what you wanted, but secondly, I can't understand why you have taken on something for which you need a bit of passion-no actually a lot of passion - to get through, but you appear not to have this for the subject. No PhD is a walk in the park, it has a large element of very hard work and you need something to keep you going (other than chocolate :$ ) and is not a soft option by any means. It looks like your supervisor assumes you are eager to get going and is helping you to get started, the kind of help that some people on here wish they had, and you are making a bit of a fool of him at the moment - and thus will be affecting every student he somes across in the future.

you should leave as soon as you can, get job hunting in earnest and let someone else have your place. In the meantime work as hard as you can to leave as good an impression as possible for those who will follow you.

Ref your note about the procedure not working - do it again with something you know should give you the desired result, if it does then you have proof that it isn't you it is the application that is at fault. You may then be able to suggest a way forward. that will be progress and therefore worthy of a 'progress report'; no result is still a result after all. Put a 'reserved' notice on your lab space and your desk and make it plain you are staying put :-)

In a situation like this, you cannot go it alone, get the student union involved first of all, then go to see your faculty head, with the member of the SU who is most appropriate. Go as high as you can, but keep everything formal. Take notes, send copies of minutes of meetings to everyone concerned. Also inform your supervisor of what you will be doing and suggest that any comments are made formally until the problem is sorted - that is in writing, or with neutral witnesses present. she obviously has no idea of the frmal procedure, or she wouldn't be acting like this.

Firslty, you are bound to feel like this. Waht you need to do is work through this. If the university have acknowledged the problem, then they may well have had a quiet- or not so quiet- word with the people concerned, but they probably can't just reverse the decision, it would look very bad for the people on the panel and would suggest that they did not know what they were doing, hence the second panel. The reason the two that you didn't want on the panel might be for the same reason. Have you made notes on the points that they raised, and have you addressed these? Make sure you do this, and if they don't bring up these points, you may want to mention in passing that you have taken on board their ideas etc., just in passing. If you haven't made a note, presumably they had a secretary in the meeting, so see if you can get the notes, if they don't make notes, you may want to suggest this, so if you have to take it further you have proof of what was said. Your supervisors are not doing you any favours by carring on as they have. They should not be piling their personal problems onto you, they should be trying to sort them out with the panel members concerned. They are grown ups. Being angry never solves problems, they should be smoothing your path. At the end of the day, this is your PhD and they are supposed to be helping you, not stirring up trouble, and should be finding ways to cool the situation not fan the flames - they can't honestly think that creating an enormous fuss will help, a quiet word should have done it and then they should get on with helping you constructively. They need to be more professional and less confrontational. If you have done all the work you can, you need to prepare yourself mentally for the next meeting with the panel. first find something that makes you calm, a piece of music, exercise, a walk etc. and mentally remember that, note the feeling you have at that moment. when you go into the room greet tha members in a formally friendly way - and mean it - body language is all, remember! sit down and take a few seconds to remember your calming thing. If you find yourself getting tense during the questioning, take a second or two to re-remember your calm. If they ask you something that you don't know/ can't remember/ is completely stupid as far as you can tell, do what you would do to anyone at a conference, just say what an interesting concept or whatever it is and that you will take note and look it up in the future. They won't expect you to know everything, but will be impressed if you show willingness to take other things on board. finally - don't give up, there are always people who want to put others down, it happens, - I had a similar experience once, when I was going for my fellowship viva , and a panel member was trying to 'prove himself', but in my case the institute phoned me up and apologised for his behaviour, but I still had to do the viva again, just to keep with convention, it may be the same in your case. Best of luck

when you have a mo mix up the following 450g of bread flour - those mixed grains ones are particularly good, 3tsp baking powder, half teaspoon of salt and about 2 dessertspoons of sugar, stir well and stick in a jar. Also prepare some 15x15squares of baking parchment (this is essential, without this you will never get them out of the muffin tray!). Then when you want something really delicious to go with your whatever, soup, salad, sauce of one sort or another - put your oven on at reg 6 - that's small cake temp in electric ovens -get your mix out and for every 75g of the mix and add 30ml of plain yoghurt and about 40ml of milk (300g will give you about 6 muffins) and mix it all together, it will be kind of like a very stiff batter, if you have ever make rock cakes, its a bit like that but slightly wetter. Put about 100g -110g on each square of paper and pop the paper into a muffin tin, it doesn't need to be smoothed out or anything, just make sure it is poked down a bit so it doesn't fall out of the hole. Bake for 25-30 mins - I usually fish them out after about 25mins and upend them, just to finish off the bottoms. They are super straight out of the oven with butter, but can be stored in their little 'cases'. Stick them in the microwave to warm them a bit and they are as if they had just been cooked.  :-). It might look a bit complicated with all the measurements, but you can estimate the size of each muffin, though I usually bung the paper on the scales so its not a big deal, and I bet after time you could estimate the rest of it too!. I saw this recipe in the Guardian, and its about the only one of their veggie recipes I've actually like the look of enough to give it a go, that and the one for flat bread :$

your library should have a searchable database of PhDs, if not, the librarian will help you find it. We have one, or used to have last time I looked, but it is only searchable whilst you are actually at uni, which I'm not at the moment. I also think you may have to think rather laterally when searching. For example, there may be newspaper articles which report the amount of rubbish collected at such festivals, which could be a starting point. You could also try waste management to see if anyone in that field has written anything. Don't forget things like noise/light pollution for people living nearby, transportation aspects etc. most I guess may be rather hard to validate but might suggest areas that could provide worthwhile research areas and you could comment upon their lack of robustness as a reason for the need for future research.

If you need the stuff urgently, I would approach another uni and see if you can borrow whatever you need and return it when yours arrives. If its medical based, you might even find the local path labs can help. (sorry, that may be really daft idea, if what you want is really obscure)Failing that- approach the company direct, explain the problem and see if they will help you out. It can't hurt to ask. :-).

I have exactly the same problem with the accounts dept at school, I've waited ages for things to be delivered only to find out that they are still stuck in the office. I have another problem though because they keep putting notices on the door banning entry except before school at break times and after school - all the times I am at my busiest - and the addendum to the message is  'no, you can't just pop in now, we are unavailable' and they never ever answer their phone :$. On the other hand I can't be too uppity with them or my stuff will be permanently at the bottom of the heap!

Not sure where you are doing your PhD, to be finishing after two years- or have I got that bit wrong? However I think you really have to wait to find out what you have to do to get it up to standard. Once you know you can start planning, get your supervisor involved with this and see what he has to say, I'm pretty sure he will know what he is doing, or know someone who can help you, go to see him with that idea in mind, pick his brains and ask if he knows who can help you with this final hurdle if you think you need to do this, but make sure you stress how much he has helped you too of course. best of luck, I'm sure you will get through this. :-)

There are people in this world who think their whole reason for being is to rubbish other people, luckily there are plenty more who will bend over backwards to help you. This person is obviously firmly in the first category, they won't change, so ignore them. Once they realise you are not going to play their silly game they will find someone else they can rattle. If you think your supervisor is ace, then they are. If they continue, do as has been suggested, and say you will raise their issues with your supervisor, otherwise ignore it and get on with what you want to do, if anything it should act as an incentive for you to succeed! :-)

Not much of a suggestion, but could you write it first in Italian and then either translate, or get someone else to translate it for you? One of my fellow students here writes her notes etc, in Greek and then uses those to write her English version.

I needed to produce a timeline for the whole thing, so i used excel to produce it. along the top I put the months and down the side I put the headings of the chapters, and sub headings where I know them, for example one chapter has labour process as the main heading and in that chapter were sub sections, theories of main people in the area - historical and modern, class issues, union issues and so on. At the end of each chapter heading there were the headings for things like reading, first draft second draft, final draft . Once the framework was in place I worked backwards, starting from submission (Yay)  and final write up blocks and I then put in first draft, second draft etc. for each chapter. The final draft for each was rather a fetching shade of yellow and was at various places on the grid, the others were shades of grey - to reflect the angst maybe :$ . You could produce this, and perhaps one a bit more detailed for year one and attach it to your submission? My lot were impressed anyway. Needless to say I have not kept to it, but never mind, the thought was there!:-)

I would probably put something like 'it has been suggested/noted/stated that..... (Smith et. al., 2001) but it does depend upon the exact rules of your referencing system as to the cut off point for putting all the names in.

There is a week long induction session where there are a lot of things discussed, one of them is the about the production of the time plan for the whole of the PhD, which is necessary for the proposal submission, which I suppose gets you going on the planning bit. We have other sessions which people can go to, but these are not part of the formal programme, mostly I think it is acquired by reading books about the PhD process.

thanks for that I will look up those refs

simple answer...Life :$:-):-)