Same pressures apply when living with your partner. Although my boyfriend and I have been living together for 5 years, since my final year of undergrad, now in 2nd year PhD, it's still a balancing act trying to spend time together and do all the other stuff. Luckily at least I know if/when we ever get married things probably won't change much. I work from home most of the time and he works shifts, I do all the cooking but housework is split fairly evenly. His shift work means that sometimes, especially if I have to go into the office, that we just won't see each other for 24 hours or longer even though we are sharing a bed!

Hi, there was a recent thread about this here

http://www.postgraduateforum.com/threadViewer.aspx?TID=21820

I'm nearly 18 months in now and during my first year I spent the first 3 months reading, reading, reading and doing more reading and also making lots of notes! I then had to submit a 7k word lit review after 3 months. After that I began learning how to use the software for my project (I do computer modelling), then running some simple experiments to understand how things worked and also developing my methodology. At my uni you have to 'upgrade' from an MPhil (everyone is registered as this in the beginning) to a PhD student. This involved writing a 13k word report to be submitted after about 8 months followed by a viva. Not all uni's go through this process but you should have already been told about it if your uni does something similar. After all that (I passed) I just carried on with my experiments and collecting data from them.

Mendeley is a free reference management software which can also store your pdf files and allows you to annotate them. You can also enter a search term and it will bring up all occurences of that word or phrase in all of your papers (they all have to be in Mendeley first though). You can also use Mendeley with Word to insert citations and generate bibliographies. It's really easy to use, I figured it all out within half an hour and it will save you so much time. There are other reference management packages available but this is the only one that I've used.

www.mendeley.com

Unless you will be living in London then you should be able to find a 2 bedroom flat or maybe even a house depending on where in the country you will be for less than £900 a month.

To get an idea of how much you can get for your money try looking on www.rightmove.co.uk as they list properties from around the country and then this should help you plan your living expenses etc.

Are you fully funded? If so there may be a separate 'pot' of money designated for conferences etc that is attached to your funding. Check with your sup or the admin person in your department before looking for external sources.

Congratulations Dr Ady!

Perhaps more important than the overall ranking of the university is the quality of the department where you would be studying. Sometimes there can be excellent departments for some subjects even though the overall university is fairly average. Also how well known is the potential supervisor in your field? This is also important to consider.

@Emmie, if you saved an excel table as an image file e.g. jpeg then I would have thought you would be able to insert it as an image instead. I haven't actually tried this yet though, it's just a guess!

I used Latex for my upgrade report earlier this year and found it much better than Word. I had issues with Word during my MSc dissertation and was glad to find an alternative. It does take a bit of perseverence to get the hang of it but the finished document just looks so much nicer. When it comes to referencing I use Mendeley and it is set to export everything to a Bibtex file which seems to put everything in the correct document class automatically and Latex seems to recognise everything as it should be. Mendeley also works with Word so I have a choice. I've never used refworks, maybe you need to tweak the settings for how it exports the info to Bibtex?

There are hundreds of universities worldwide, no one can possibly make any kind of useful suggestion unless you say what subject area you are interested in and which country you would potentially like to study in.

As far as I'm concerned the student loans company can wait before they get my money. I'm paying off a career development loan that I took out for my MSc because it has to be paid off now but I'm ignoring my undergrad loans because they don't have to be paid until I'm earning more money. If you have a bit of spare money then save it because it could be very useful if you're still working on the PhD when funding runs out.

got it, PM me your address

I don't work 9-5 mainly because a lot of the time I work from home so I feel more comfortable setting my own hours which are usually 11-7pm. On days when I go into uni I am there from 10.30-5.15 this is because I live quite a long way from uni and the train takes ages (2.5 hours!) so to get in for 9am would mean getting a train at 6.30am which unless I never do unless I absolutely have to be in at that time. Fortunately my supervisor is happy with me working from home and coming in when necessary to run experiments etc (I do computer modelling but can only do it on my uni computer).

From what I've observed about other people in my office some do 9-5 others come in a bit later and stay a bit later but still do around 8 hours. There are some who will come in for an hour or 2 then go home to work. If you are having one of those days where your brain gives up at 3pm and you don't need to do anything in the lab then go home for the day, you may find that you can get a bit of reading done at home or just have a bit of extra relaxing time and then work a bit longer the next day.

I attended a time management course earlier this year and the key piece of advice given was to try and maintain the 8/8/8 rule of splitting up your time. So this would be 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure and to take weekends off - basically maintain a normal schedule where possible. Obviously there will be times when this won't be possible e.g. extra lab work, deadlines etc and work time may encroach into one of the 8 hour chunks of time but this should be the exception.

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Getting paid every 3 months is a bit of a pain but I seem to get through it by being fairly strict on my spending on non essentials (i.e. clothes, dvds, books etc) for the first 2 months and then having a little splurge just before the next pay day.

With regards to finding a bank I'm a UK national so don't really know how things work when you're an international student. I have a student account with HSBC and they let me have a generous interest free overdraft (very helpful sometimes!) and I haven't had any problems with them.

I agree with the previous post about asking around at freshers fair/student union as these people should be able to help you.

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Hi Basictonal,

Tea breaks during the day and the drinks receptions in the evenings are a good chance to get to know people and have a chat. I turned up at the drinks reception on the first evening of a conference by myself last year and obviously looked a bit lost but another PhD student came over and introduced me to some other students and we had a good chat. My sup was also there as well last year but he'd got swept up talking to other people so I'm glad I found the students!

If there is a poster session this can also be a good time to chat to people simply by asking questions about their poster.

I wouldn't worry about trying to 'talk to everyone', I'm quite shy and find it difficult to go up to people. Even if you only get to chat to a couple of people at least you will have made some contacts.

Hope you have a good time :-)