======= Date Modified 05 Apr 2011 13:23:31 =======
Hi Chococake I don't work outside my PhD mainly because I had to work throughout my BSc and MSc and it is nice to be able to devote all my time to PhD work without having to fit it in around a job. During my MSc which I did part time I worked 5 days a week in the first year and had 2 days at uni so very rarely got any time to myself. I took out a loan for the second year so could cut my shifts down at work, which was necessary to avoid burn out.

The only thing I have to do is 2 hours demonstrating a week during term time. Last term I had to go through the notes for the session beforehand then do the session but all in all that amounts to less than one days work a week and it's a condition of my studentship so I have kind of accepted it as part of my PhD and don't consider it to be additional work.

Hopefully I won't get roped into doing any extra teaching next year as I've never really wanted to teach.

nice :-)

I also agree with the ups and downs and yesterday certainly had quite a few for me.

I went from being totally confused on how to process my data in the correct way to then figuring it out and being pleased with myself. Then I realised I had made mistakes in my code and had to start again which put me in a bad mood until I saw an email from a place where I did an internship last summer saying that they are submitting a paper partly based on some of the work that I did and they are offering me 3rd author. I'm really happy about this as I'm only in my first year and I thought they had forgotten about me. Then my data processing went wrong again so I was grumpy again. I'm dealing with some complex data sets and only need to extract certain sections of data and it is a complicated process. Finally at the end of the day my boyfriend walked me home from the train station and kind of restored balance.

Today is a day off though as I think I deserve it. Perhaps you should try and take a day of KB to unwind a little bit as you said you don't normally feel like this unless you're ill so perhaps you are a little run down.

I was annoyed by that too even though I don't have my PhD yet. Even though I have a masters plus everything else that goes before that, I only ticked 1 box more than my bf who has GCSEs and NVQs which he thought was quite funny

That does sound a bit mean from your fiance, my boyfriend can be a bit like that sometimes but we are the other way around in terms of sleep. I love getting 9-10 hours but have to make do with around 7.5 in the week and that's going to bed at 10.30pm (I have a long commute to uni). However he will be quite happy on 6 hours some days and will moan at me going to bed early, especially as he works shifts and some days we don't see each other even though we live together. But other times I can't get him out of bed.

I get told sometimes that because I get to sit down all day it's not hard work, bf has to be on his feet all day at work, but I know he's only teasing most of the time.

glad I could help :-)

I've recently switched to writing in LaTeX as my sup suggested it would be a good idea because I will have lots of equations etc and the great thing about Mendeley is it automatically creates BiBTeX files if you tell it to so I can now cite all my references in word or LaTeX. However using LaTeX is definitely quite a steep learning curve!

You can but would have to do it manually. So if you had written blah blah (Smith, 2011) and inserted the citation using Mendeley then you would have to manually type e.g. in the parantheses so then you would get (e.g. Smith, 2011). I haven't found any other way around it yet. Hope that makes sense.

I like using google chrome, it just seems 'nicer' and more user friendly than the others although I don't really use it for fancy stuff.

Hi
career development loans are available for post grad courses and you will be able to find information on eligibility on the link below, I'm not sure if your citizenship status will allow to apply

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/AdultLearning/FinancialHelpForAdultLearners/CareerDevelopmentLoans/DG_10033237

But you may be able to find some more information on benefits etc from the direct gov website

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/index.htm

or even from the citizens advice bureau

http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/

hope some of this is helpful

I don't feel like there is a disadvantage then again in my department of approx 20 students the majority are around the age of 25, I will be too in 48 hours! I think it depends as others have commented on what type of person you are, evidently in my department there are a lot of dedicated youngsters. Sometimes I feel a bit jealous of friends who left education after their undergrad degrees and now have jobs/ been travelling etc but I really enjoy what I'm doing so it doesn't bother me much.

Hi for the UK as far as I am aware you will be graded pass (50-59%) merit (60-69%) or distinction (70%+) for a masters. This is based on the grading at the uni where I studied my MSc and comments from 3 friends who all studied masters degrees at different universities in the UK. There may however be variations as this example only applies to 4 institutions.

I don't know about merit or distinction at PhD level. I think it's either a pass, pass with minor/major corrections, MPhil or fail.

Hope this helps.

got it and have sent you a pm

Sorry to hear that, but it is good that you have more interviews lined up and with the feedback you had from the last interview it shows that you were very close to what they were looking for so take that as a confidence boost for your next interviews.

Best of luck with getting your PhD place.

Hi Chococake, you're right Mendeley does support Harvard and my department is based on Harvard with irritating minor changes! I'm not sure about getting things from uni catalogues, I tend to just download pdfs and then dump them into mendeley and this seems to work well. You can also add a web importer tool but I don't tend to use it because it just seems to import the reference but not the file. It also has a cite while you write tool which is very useful.

At least if you choose a free one and you don't like it then you won't lose any money :-)

I've been using Mendeley for a couple of months now following a previous recommendation on this forum. So far it's been good and I've been able to use it all the computers I work on. The only issue I have is that as far as I can tell it doesn't support the exact same referencing format my department requires for a reference list (it may be there and my department does seem to be very particular in what they want) although admittedly I haven't spent that long going through the different formats because it's a bit boring tbh! Therefore a bit of manual editing is required.

I mostly use it offline and update it regularly so I can access my pdfs and notes anywhere. Biggest bonus is it's free and the main reason I chose it was because I had heard so many bad things about endnote both here and in my department from other PhDers.