I find my subject really interesting, but like you, I also find that there's so much day-to-day, repetitive lab work to do that I can also go weeks (and months) without really thinking about anything other than ordering new vials and looking after students and routine assays. It can be really draining and it makes you forget your original aims.

Juno is NEVER too tired to eat;-)

I'm pretty lucky being footloose and fancy-free, as it were, at the moment: this PhD would probably be a nightmare if I had family commitments. With mine there are a lot of demands from industrial partners: we would lose our funding almost immediately if we didn't deliver the results, so late nights and weekends are unavoidable at busy periods. If you have a family I would not recommmend industry-sponsored PhDs!

There must be some sort of mid-gound between treating it as a 9-5 and a personal quest, I think: at times you will probably have to put in extra, but not so much that you drive yourself nuts. One of my colleagues (post-doc) refuses to do anything beyond 5pm, or anything outside of their strict job description (is creating a big stink at the moment cos a meeting went on till 5.30pm - imagine! - yesterday), which sometimes makes me wonder if I really need to be working late so much...who is right? The one who sticks to the rigid job description and won't go an iota over it, or the one who gives themselves a breakdown overdoing it cos it's their pet project?

Like the Buddha (or someone) said, perhaps it's the middle way that's best.

Lab-based PhDs normally have to keep a journal; it officially belongs to the sponsor of the research and they retain it for future reference. Mind you they won't be able to read a word; my handwriting is so bad even I can't understand half of it anymore.

All the recent posts from people who say they've been criticised for their writing have been interesting, because
every one of those posts was written in correctly punctuated and stylish English! I've seen some really shocking written English from native speakers at PhD level, but those people couldn't even write a forum post or email correctly (and I
know, cos I get sent bloody messages from them every day). You don't seem that bad to me (though granted, I'm not a professor of English).

Sorry, Bill didn't say "hero". He said "God".

How about a bolt of lightning up the arse for old Bill, for taking Thy name in vain?

Precisely. While it may not be forced sex in the physical sense, the law recognises that 12 year old girls are not emotionally ready for sex, or capable of making a fully informed decision to have sex, and therefore the age of consent exists to protect them from predatory men such as those described by Bill as "heroes". It is legally rape to have sex with a child.

Do you have any tips for switching off from it all, Walminpeasucker?

I'd like to relax but I'm also scared of losing momentum: I can't afford to start slipping!

Misandrist.

Less commonly used, maybe because it's a less common phenomemon that the fear and loathing of women that men like Bill feel.

What a charmer you are, Smr888.

Bonzo...know what you mean, I've been busting my gut lately and seriously hoping that future research will not be like this; 7 days a week, up to 15 hours a day. I'm getting to the point where I can't sleep and I'm close to snapping at our summer placement students and their endless daft questions.

As for getting ahead: I think that it's often a matter of luck and supportive supervisors. Some PhD students have already had all the groundwork laid out by previous students, for example, and for them it's much easier to treat it as a 9-5 and still get good results; for the rest of us, the work has to be done from scratch and that means office hours are just not enough.

Juno is sympathetic towards Tricky (up).
And is hoping that her LCMS runs overnight OK.

Hmmm...my favourite bit is the defence of child rapists:

"Notice how the word 'rape' is purposely used by the media and the law in order to bamboozle the mostly unthinking public into thinking that this girl was forced into having sex; the idea, as ever, being to demonise as much as possible those men who have behaved inappropriately."

Nice. Are you proud of yourself, Bill?

Ah, so you help would-be students find places. What nice people you are.

I had thought that you did this website in the evenings, and that you all led double lives.

Is it? I never knew that.

What do the forum administrators do when they're not stopping us being too rude to each other; are they students too?