Yeah unless she's a lone parent, benefits for full-time students are pretty non-existent. If you do get income support then you will get things like council tax benefit/housing benefit as part of that.

You're right enough though - unless you are actually in that situation it's impossible to get straight answers from anyone to allow you to plan, and the maternity leave aspect is going to baffle them all even more. Have you been on the Directgov website? It can take a bit of digging sometimes but most of the information you need will be on there. Also the student support section of your wife's prospective university may be able to offer some advice too.

I believe that they don't take maintenance grants into account when looking at your income for Tax Credit purposes. Are you going to be going back to work (as depending on the hours you do, you're eligible for more money in the form of working tax credit)?

Otherwise you at least should be eligible for Income Support and the associated benefits that come with it (but check this because eligibility changes all the time), however your wife won't be as a full-time student. The only thing I can suggest is going back to the CAB and pretending you are in that situation already! Bureaucratic madness :-)

Be clinical and factual about it and show no fear. If you're (obviously) nervous, that will make them nervous, and there's nothing worse than a room full of tittering 18 year old boys. You might get a few anyway - ignore them unless it becomes an issue then shut them right down. Or shut them down immediately if it'll make you feel better to set clear boundaries. Sometimes they don't notice they've left high school until they graduate. Sometimes not even then *sigh*

I do some science outreach work in secondary schools, you'd be amazed how even something ridiculous like the polarization of light can be sexualized in the wrong hands (minds?).

:-( That's frustrating, but also positive in a way.

I work on an engineering education journal, and we reject a fair proportion of submissions - usually if it's rejected by the Editor it doesn't quite meet the scope that the Editor wants for the journal. Has there been a change in Editorial team since papers similar to yours were published? We reject papers which are great on engineering research, but don't bring education into it, or great on engineering and education, just not in the right engineering discipline. The papers themselves could be absolutely perfectly written and immediately publishable, just not quite right for us.

We also have reviewers coming back many weeks down the line rejecting papers with just one or two sentences, and we have to feed that back to the disappointed authors. Preferable an immediate rejection allowing you to look elsewhere (and not criticising the quality of the paper) than one three months from now with little more than "poorly written manuscript"!! Yeah, thanks for that constructive feedback (up)

House!! And things like Mock the Week, Harry Hill...I tend to buy my nature documentaries on DVD rather than watch them on TV at the time (why?! No idea, although I do get them on Bluray so they're all pretty like).

And I'm a news addict but usually just in the morning before work, all the bad news gets me grumpy for the rest of the day and I don't want to hear any more when I get home.

There seems to be a bit of a theme of bitterness and/or satire with my TV watching :-)

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With therapy I think you really need to "shop around" and try a few until you find one that has the right approach for you. Sadly that means meeting people like the one you had - that approach may have worked for someone else, but not you, and they should have adjusted it accordingly.

The Uni counselling service at my Uni deals with depressed student constantly, ones who have taken time out, postgrad and undergrad...they will support you and be able to give you some details of who to contact to get back in, and also support you as you do get back into everything.

Do you have a Registry or central admin office? There will be several layers dealing with postgrads - obviously the supervisors, the head of school, someone in charge of research within the school, and a few people in the central office admining and overseeing it all. Forget your supervisor, you need to go higher. It may be that you need to be allocated a new one - this might not be a bad thing from the sounds of it. Either contact the central office, or the new head of school. All this information must be available on the uni website, surely?

I think it's very easy for PG students to fall through the cracks. It's the worst thing to have to try and do when you're depressed, but you need to try and fight a bit more if this is what you want to do. Be a bit more pushy and argumentative, and who cares what other people might be thinking. This is about you, not them, and it's too important to you to let them push you out. Even if you can find someone to draft the letters/emails for you and you send them in your name, so you're not having to really face and think about the actual arguments.

Edit: I should also say no-one hates you. You're a victim of the apathy that is prevalent in academia with a lot of lecturers. Because you're not right there physically asking them these questions, you're all too easy to put to the back of the queue. It won't be anything personal - honestly, I get exactly the same thing and I work in the department! Certain people will not respond to me until I am literally beating down their door and they have no choice. So don't think it's you and your depression.

This thread is well timed - I've got a PhD offer for May but I'm actually scared to take it up because the project intimidates me a bit. It's in an area I've touched on (quantum mechanics) but only in a fairly basic way, obviously, since it was only UG - and even then it was in 2007. I feel like the leap is going to be too much, and everyone will think I've completely fabricated my degree or something because I'll look really stupid and struggle with it (hello neuroses, my old friend). I'm really happy to hear that it's pretty standard to feel lost to start with and then work it out from there.
Still scary though. Where's the "oh sh-" smiley?? :-(

I wouldn't recommend it - our students always get pulled up on this if they do it. Best to reference everything that you haven't created yourself.

You'd be entitled to child tax credit, but not working tax credit, from what I can gather.

Do you work at all - even just demonstrating a few hours per week? You could possibly see about things like income support. Universities vary wildly in terms of the help they offer student parents so go and see your student support section, they will be able to advise you of what is available from the Uni and whether you qualify/how to apply. Regarding full time vs part time places - if the help is substantial enough, you could always just take a full time place and not use every day. You would have to obviously do the financial calculations on that one.

I would visit the Citizen's Advice Bureau or Job Centre for benefits advice to make sure you're getting everything you're qualified for. You're going to need it all! Congratulations :-)

I'm rubbish at deleting emails so I still have your address, I'll send it over :-)

I've found all 3, PM your email address and I'll send them over to you :-)

If Supervisor #2's student needs your data that badly he/she can get it from your thesis. That's part of being a PhD student. There's huge red flags all over the place here. If you don't need anything from #2 again, ignore him. Get references from #1 (and consider telling him what #2 is doing). The time for #2 to raise issues was way before you were awarded the degree and there's nothing that he can do now.

Don't worry about your PhD, that sounds safe, but be suspicious of this person's motives.

Hmm, that sounds really odd. There's something else going on there I think, whether his student's results are dodgy or whether they better support something he's working on. You've graduated! Unless they can prove some kind of fraud, there's no way they'd be able to strip you of that. I'm really scratching my head to think of another way they would be able to take it off you.

Don't change your results. You got what you got. You defended it in your viva. It was accepted and you were awarded the degree. I've not heard of this before so it sounds really weird to me, but maybe someone else has come across this. This is only my personal opinion! To go back and change the results without you rerunning the experiments yourself...I don't see how you can do that.

Can you submit the paper to a journal yourself? Not sure of the general etiquette with paper publication. If it's then accepted, you've published the 5 papers he wants so much.

I might be inclined to discuss it with whoever is in charge of research at your University, or a student representative, as they will be able to guide you on the reasons a PhD might be rescinded. It would be VERY difficult for them to do.

I work on a journal with a fairly focussed topic and this is very common for papers that don't quite fit us but might fit better with our sister journal. If the Editor thought the paper wasn't publishable at all, it would have been rejected outright - the remarks are positive. Good luck! (up)

Is it just how to sort that you need help with? There is a sort option in both Excel 2003 and 2007 - I've only got access to 2007 just now and with that you go to the data tab, and then "sort", and choose the column you want to sort the data by and whether you want it ascending or descending. I can't remember where it is in 2003 now - "tools" or something like that.

Sorry if that's not what you're asking, I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning so I'm probably missing the point completely :$