I've not actually heard of an undergraduate masters. Unless it refers to the MPharm degree; apparantely the final year of that (4-year) degree is considered a Masters-level year.

Greetings Lynn

Well, party season's over so no distractions for you.

Is anyone making any?

I'm going to try to watch less crap TV and read more: not just in my own area, though - I need to get some wider culture, I think. So I've taken out subscriptions to Geographical and Astronomy Now magazines as an easy starting point.

Fair enough.

Actually, I'm wondering how on earth you can remember your own username? Mine's only 4 letters and I still type it incorrectly half the time; how do you manage?

Good luck. One last thing: don't worry about what other people have listed in their CVs; they're probably fibbing

I think the majority of universities will accept a 2:1 without a Masters. Most PhDs these days are 3 years in duration, structured so that the first year is considered an "MPhil" year. At the end of the first year you write an MPhil thesis, and if this is good enough, you are then allowed to continue the next two years as your PhD.

Smilodon is correct; there are no lists. You can look in the relevant journals for advertised PhDs, or contact potential supervisors directly.

I wouldn't live with friends. You will want to kill each other by the end of the first month.

When I see those kind of "help me" messages, I usually assume that the poster will be making their own contacts and searches and that posting questions on this forum is just a kind of back-up to that.

I coule be completely wrong, of course. But I'm not sure why it bothers some other forum members so much

There is a lot of peer pressure in this season. I think we should not give in to it: no-one says that you have to visit your family on the 25th of December. You can visit them, and have better time with them, at any other time of year, instead of rushing round the country like a blue-arsed-fly trying to fit visits to all your relatives into one week.

I ignored Christmas by choice this year: I'll visit my mother's family in January, my father's in Feb, my brother's in March, and so on.

All most interesting...but I still think there are more brunettes in academia simply because there are more brunettes in existence.

Do you really think the idea of the blonde as automatically more attractive still holds? I've rarely met a man who had a preference.

But I agree that girls are encouraged to be physically attractive above all else. I was reading Jane Austen recently (for the first time) and it was very noticable how the girls were defined by their good character, or self-control, or accomplishments. It's all about tits these days, isn't it?

Hi Julia,

I'm going to answer both your posts here (if I can):

Re: Master's funding. I have heard that a lot of people apply for Career Development Loans to cover a Master's degree. Apart from that, there are a number of bursaries available - your potential university should be able to give you information about those. But I didn;t do a Master's, so I hope one of the other forum members can give you better advice.

As for lack of lab experience: I think this probably depends very much on your potential supervisor: he or she may be more interested in your motivation (after all, you can always learn lab skills during your PhD). But if you think it will be a problem, you could offer to assist voluntarily on a university lab project for a set period of time (say, 1-2 months).

Let us know how you get on

Well, that's what I suspected . Just wanted it confirmed.

"Issues around longer than average submission times and "adequate" use of English in manuscripts would crop up and invariably relate more to international students than home students (who had been rigourously pre seleted by MRC/ Wellcome etc already)."

I know this was only a minor point in your overall argument, but I've seen some shockingly bad written English coming from native speaking PhD students. In my experience they are generally worse than overseas students who've actually been trained to speak (and write) correct English.