Hi Gidget

Have you read 'How to get a PhD' by Phillips and Pugh? In the fourth edition on pg62 they give 15 definitions of originality, which can include making a synthesis of other people's work or continuing an original piece of work. I found it useful.

I suggest you do a taught masters. With many of the funding bodies, experience cannot compensate for a 2.2, but a masters usually can.

Hi Emily

So sorry to hear you've had such a hard time with such poor supervision and lack of support from your uni. I'm glad you took action and got yourself some help when you saw you were getting depressed.

I can't really offer any advice as I am only in the early stages of my PhD, but I do hope your supervisor is able to get funding so at least you have the option to carry on working on it for another year, though it is not ideal. Though no qualification is worth your mental health and maybe a short break from the PhD would be a good idea right now. It could give you time to decide what is important to you and what you want to do after the PhD. Also I don't believe 'not giving up' and trying to plod on is a good idea if one is depressed.

Good luck. Take care of yourself and cut yourself some slack.

The right test will depend on many things:

What exactly do you want to compare- differences among the drugs or between the observed and predicted?
Where did you get the predicted values from? Are they from a statistical model?
Are these means or raw values?
How many drugs are there?
How many individuals within each drug?
What is the distribution of the values.

The paired t-test (or any t-test) assumes that the values are normally distributed and should only be used if you have at least 30 pairs of observations. Alternatively, the Mann-Whitney test could be used, which doesn't require those assumptions.

May the force be with you!

If you are planning to start the masters this year, then, as has been suggested, you should visit a careers advisor ASAP.  A masters is a big commitment and it isn't something you should do just 'to get it out of the way'. The wrong masters could limit your career path. I would echo taking the time to really think about your interests, plans and reasons.

Hi

Bristol and Bath are also top 15 universities.

Once a upon a time I also wanted to do that MSc at LSE! I don't want to put you off, but I think it is important to be aware that many people find it hard to get work in development when they have done degrees like that. In my opinion the people sought after in development have skills in Public Health, engineering, project management and other things more practical and less theoretical.

Anyway good luck and stay an idealist!

Wow, the amount of great support on this forum is really heartening! I hope you are feeling slightly better about this Fairycakes. One thing I would add is try to do a Presentation Skills or Public Speaking course. Your uni probably runs them or you could try a local FE college. I doubt there are many 'natural' public speakers. All politicians/ tv presenters, etc get this kind of training and I'm sure they all felt like us when they were starting out.

As the saying goes: a bird in the hand... Plus it is defintely not a good idea to turn down something once you've already accepted it, especially if it would be in a couple of months' time when they'd have to re-advertise at such a late stage. I reckon you should congratulate yourself on getting funding, be grateful and then enjoy your summer knowing that your plans are sorted.

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Hi



Look at sites like findaphd.com. Studentships normally pay a minimum of just under £13k per year.

Hi Apple

If you are thinking of doing multilevel regression you should definitely use a decent statistical package. MLWin is the specialist software for this and can deal with all the possible regression types. However, if it is just linear multilevel regression you can use Stata or SAS. I'm sure it is possible in SPSS too but I haven't done it in that. It's really important to make sure that you enter the data in a format that will make it easy for you to analyse if you don't want to faf around with rearranging the data in a software that is new to you. Try getting the manual or looking at the online help for the package you will use and how their data is organised in their multilevel regression examples. Also, you may prefer putting the data directly into the analysis package as opposed to via Excel as you can then add value labels and variable descriptions, etc.

Good luck

If it is not your background they may not expect you to be able to answer many technical questions, but you'll probably have to justify your interest in that area and explain what you will do/ are doing to find out about the area.

A list of other general questions are on this site: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/careers/resources/further-study/interviews/example-interview-questions

Hi Jonathan

If you know that you want to do a PhD and the topic area, then I'd say just go ahead and apply. Obviously, your application would have been stronger if those three years of work were relevant to your chosen topic, but the longer you leave it the harder you may find it pyschologically to leave your job, get back into the groove of studying, used to the lower income, etc. Three years is not such a long time.

Good luck!

The easiest way to go about it is probably to just modify the statistical methods sections of research papers that will employ a similar methodology to yours. There are also many formulae and sample size calculators available online if you do not yet know how big your study will be.

Hi John

Check out this site which has a huge list of potential questions:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/careers/resources/further-study/interviews/example-interview-questions

In addition, depending on if your first degree was related, you may also get asked questions to see you good you are at interpreting basic statistical concepts, for example, 'how would you define a p-value, 95% CI'? etc

Good luck!:-)