Hhhmmm, an interesting quiz, but not sure what I did with the clock to be told I'm "born of the age of flower power, but a child of today - peace and love"!!!! :-)

I got the same water-earth result as H and Missspacey!

Oh yes, I forgot to say, a friend did a Theology BA years ago, then he became a nurse, then ended up teaching theology in schools, then slightly bizarrely has apparently been thinking about becoming a prison officer. It's a slightly odd career trajectory, moving from trying to understand the world to helping the sick to wanting to lock people up. Possibly a set of life choices you may not want to emulate!

I'm afraid I can't really help. If your interests are not obviously vocational at the moment, perhaps a career in academia would suit you. Alternatively, maybe taking a year out after your BA would be useful to help you work out what direction you want to go in.

BAs and MAs don't necessarily 'match up' though - mine were social sciences and design studies respectively, which I did because I found them both interesting. They have unexpectedly combined extremely well in my ongoing PhD, so what doesn't seem an obvious choice of subject while you're doing it can be very useful at a later stage in your life.

How do you think those cute and furry giantmicrobes might be educational?

I don't think they would make me wash my hands to get rid of germs, because they're mildly endearing rather than scary. (If I was young and impressionable and not great with personal hygiene, that is).

Are they supposed to be scaremongering, if fear of disease is a good thing?

You say you've got 2 years left until you finish your BA, so maybe it's a bit premature to decide on an MA course at the moment. If you have to write a final year dissertation, why not explore other ideas such as philosophical ones in that? Then you'd be making an informed choice when you start thinking about post-grad options. You've got plenty of time.

I was just going to say the same thing, Golfpro...

Nnenna, you will really have to start thinking for yourself if you want to do research, and that includes selecting your own topic and writing your proposal. It's different to an undergraduate degree. Why not give it a try? Good luck!

It's great that you've found a topic that interests you, but you'll have to narrow it down into a viable project by thinking about it in more detail. Presumably you've done some research already to get to this point, so perhaps think about what aspect of it you find the most interesting and why. Have you spotted gaps in existing research, where you could make a new contribution? Maybe you disagree with work that has already been been done in that area, and want to offer a fresh perspective. If you want to collect data, start thinking about what exactly you want to collect - what precisely do you want to know, how would you collect it and why would this help you find answers to a question you think needs asking? Can you think of any problems you might have in collecting it, ethical, practical or otherwise?

Topics can be huge, but by thinking about an angle that you personally find really interesting and that is also an original idea in the existing field is the next stage. This is where your supervisor comes into the process, as they need to help you talk through your ideas and focus on an aspect of it that would be a viable masters project, in both its academic content and actually possible to complete within the time you have to do it. Ultimately it will have to be your own work, but they should have helped you to shape it and will be involved in assessing it.

Hi Lara,

You're definitely not lazy, honestly!!! Lazy would *never* have got you this far in the first place! Do you have a definite date when your sup is going to get back to you? Will you get comments by email or have to speak to them too? I know what you mean about preparing for the worst, I get like that sometimes when I've handed something in I'm not sure about, but am usually pleasantly surprised by the feedback. You can't tell at this point as you're just too close to it, but all the corrections you've done in the past week will count. Maybe you will have to restructure or rewrite bits following the feedback, but at least all the basic errors will be out of the way by then, and they are so tediously time consuming to do that you'll have already saved lots of time.

I'm just about to have some lunch and get stuck in again to my chapter 5. Had to go to some plumbers merchants this morning to get some new kitchen taps, as I think one of the knobs would have spun right off and left water gushing everywhere if I'd left it any longer. The plumber's gone now, so I'd better get down to some academic business. It would be good to finish this chapter and make some decent progress with rewriting chapter 1 by Tuesday lunchtime. Then I can go to some lectures at college by a couple of the textile research fellows late afternoon, which should be interesting.

So my aims for today: read new articles for chapter 5 and start restructuring it.

Armendaf hope you manage to get some work done on yours before your evening lecture.
Lara good luck with yours too!

See you later! (up)

I agree with everything the others have said. This forum is invaluable to me at present, as I'm in the final writing-up stage of my PhD and it's the most isolating thing I've ever done. It's inevitable that it's just you glued to your computer all day at this point in the process, so to be able to pop over and see how others in the same situation are getting on is proving far more supportive than I thought it would be. It's a great alternative to the days I don't want to physically travel into college, and it's just as helpful as my 'real' colleagues. I think it's also stopped me boring my friends and family to tears about PhD stuff, which they don't really understand anyway, so they're pleased too!

Yes, very interesting, thanks Tricky!! A nice future storyline for the CSI scriptwriters maybe.

I don't get these word associations sometimes. :$ Apologies if I'm being unusually slow today, but could someone tell me the associations between the last two...? Or maybe I should just marvel at the curious way other people's minds work!

I wondered something like that when there was that business a while ago about some US undertakers replacing dead people's bones with plastic plumbing pipes, and selling off body parts to tissue labs for grafts and suchlike. If you'd had a double-arm transplant like the man in the news today and you were in a CSI situation, would it mess up their forensic results? I'm not a scientist, so maybe I'm thinking silly things too!