I got the job! Start in 2 weeks .

Have to give notice at my shop assistant job today .

How did you go, cc? Mine wasn't too bad. Three interviewers all sitting looking at me in my spiffy new suit. There was one big question in the middle that they asked me to use an example from my work experience to answer, and I could think of no example. Just cringe every time I think about that bit now. Groan. Apart from that it was okay. Fingers crossed. Hope you are okay cc.

Ha ha!

Boo Yeah.

...and Australia.

I think jojo "on holidays" is still more productive than some of us working "flat out"! Welcome back, jojo.

What a coincidence, I have an interview on Thursday too! Mine is for a technical advice position at a lab product company. Not my dream job, but I think I would be good at it and it would certainly enable me to learn a lot. The pay is more than I am earning as a shop assitant and the hours are normal Monday to Friday. I bought a suit to wear to the interview today - cost me more than a weeks pay!

I am nervous too, which is bad because when I am nervous, I say really stupid, ditzy things - have to make a conscious effort to think before I speak. My biggest fear is I don't have a strong enough molecular biology knowledge and that I will be asked technical questions that will advertise this.

Good luck, cc!

...and Protocol Online returns no hits for it, so I begin to wonder too...

I listened to the Flaming Lips while I was stuck in traffic for an hour this afternoon.

I always think of baklava when I see posts by bakuvia too!

I wrote past tense for everything, I think. My methods were "Following incubation, 200uL of solution X was added to the reaction and the samples were centrifuged....". Similarly, my results were "Strain A showed greater activity towards substrate B, but Strain C showed greater activity towards substrate D". I never really thought about tense, I just wrote that way without thinking about it. But I my PhD is in science and you can get away with terrible writing in science!

Thanks, rick. Our review article was actually in the top 10 most requested articles from that journal the year it was published .

Don't feel you have to apologise for starting this thread, Andy. As I said, having a big fat whinge makes me feel better. This is the perfect place to say what you feel, good or bad.

So often I am faced with people I know swooning out of their PhD straight into a prize post-doc position with no effort whatsoever. I want to strangle them. It may be my imagination, but I feel everybody I know is thinking "What is wrong with Piglet? She has a PhD and can't even get a job".

I have enjoyed the opportunity to share my pathetic story, so thank you for this thread, Andy...I am Piglet and I can't get a job.

This thread and cockroaches are the only two things on Earth that can survive a nuclear disaster.

Mine is exactly the same format as Seabirds.

I was required to write a 3500 word lit review in the first 6 months of my PhD. It was a terrible piece of work, but my supervisor wanted to publish it as a review paper. So in my 2nd year I spent a couple of months working on expanding and rewriting it (with a lot of help from 4 other authors) and it was accepted for publication. Boy, did the champagne flow that day!

As I was first author, that paper went straight into my thesis as my lit review/introduction unchanged, saving me a lot of time and effort in the write-up stage. My suggestion is to look at your own lit reviews and maybe some of you could get yours published as a review-type paper in a similar way? Review papers are great because everybody refers to them in subsequent papers; lots of "This work has been reviewed in detail previously (Piglet et al. 2004)" and "For a review of this work refer to Piglet et al (2004)".