i just finished up a whole lot of things - so now i am taking it easy! the next 10 days or so will be devoted to important issues such as buying a new bike (my funding arrived), getting a cat from the local pet home, getting bureaucracy stuff done, cleaning up the house from top to bottom, going for walks (depending on the weather), watching DVDs, reading a good book, gardening, and the like. that's my vacation for this year.

no i believe pinkneuron is our super-mum she has about 6 kids and she started a neuroscience PhD last autumn. hasn't been around for while. i hope everything is ok! if you drop in, do leave a word please, pinkneuron!

i know of people who got ESRC funding that way: they applied during their first year and started getting funding from the second year onwards. in the ESRC guidelines it is specifically stated that this is possible. i don't know if the same counts for the other research councils too, though.

this said, i do feel as if i have been prepared, to an extent, to doing a PhD. it is basically very much "more of the same" for me, except on a bit higher level. on the other hand, i feel like i do not have any standardised canonical knowledge of my discipline. i know bits and pieces, here and there, whatever i picked up during my meandering, self-directed studies. huge holes and gaping gaps left and right. so, whereas i feel like my previous studies did to an extent prepare me for the research and self-directedness of a PhD, they did not really provide me with any solid, general, background knowledge.

in regards to my own, swiss, educational background: my studies were very self-driven. i had no single exam during my bachelor/master years, before the final exams at the very end (after submission of the masters thesis). there were NO compulsory courses. there were no graded essays. from the beginning of my university years, i was simply required to choose topics i was interested in, find a prof/staff who would accept a paper on that, then write a paper on it, which would get accepted/pass or rejected/fail. i had to write a total of 6 such papers before starting on my masters thesis. if i wanted to attend courses on these topics (if there were any) i was welcome to, but i didn't have to - no one cared how you learned your stuff as long as you did. my masters thesis had to include significant "own research", and be between 80 and 120 pages long (most end up longer).

of course, in those days, the university system was still quite different than today. in switzerland at least, there were then no such things as bachelor or master degrees. rather, if you graduated from university, you were immediately a Dr.
on the other hand, if you wanted to graduate, you had to submit a thesis which was already quite like a modern day PhD. you just didn't divide your 7, 8 years of studies into different stages - and if you were good enough, you could do it faster, without going through the hassle of first doing a masters etc.
einstein submitted a 17-pages doctoral dissertation. it was rejected for being too short. he added a few sentences. they finally grudgingly accepted it because it was so brilliant. it is still, today, one of the most cited papers around - although it had nothing to do with his theory of relativity, it is about methodological improvements.

the information about Einstein is not quite correct. he tried to get into university without a highschool degree, but failed the entrance exams despite exceptional high results in maths and physics (in switzerland, where he was applying, you have to pass in many different subjects, not just those you wish to study - in those days, that would have included latin and perhaps greek, french, german, history, biology and geography, perhaps philosophy, i believe, besides maths and physics). so he went to highschool and got that degree. then he enrolled at uni and finally graduated from there. THEN he couldn't find a job and ended up at the patent office, during which time he developed his relativity theories. so, he DID have formal eduction, what he didn't have, was a job.

BHC while i understand that speaking out about the sabrina incident won't bring her work back, and i agree that it is not absolutely necessary for you to bring it up - you do need to speak to someone about being threatened. this is about you, not about sabrina.

tell your boss or your line manager or your HR, or your welfare office, or someone. but get it out there on the record. you can say that you don't want anything to happen, that you are not pressing for anything. but you need to get it on record. so that somewhere someone has it written down and filed that you have been threatened.

then, next time katy does threaten you, you tell her right out that you told X and if she makes her threat true, they will back you up. and if she spreads rumors without the preliminary threat, then you have a much firmer position than if you hadn't told someone beforehand.
please, do protect yourself.

BHC this sounds like a serious situation to me! you are now effectively being blackmailed and threatened. you can't let this be and hope that grass grows over it. if this katy learns through this experience that she has power over you, she will use it another time. and then again. and again. the longer you leave it before you do something about it, the harder it will be - you will be implicated (for not having reacted earlier).
i think you need to tell someone that you were threatened to be set up as a harasser. you need to protect yourself. it's an ugly situation but if you do nothing, i suspect it will just get uglier! i am sure there is somewhere in the university that should deal with something like this. you are, after all, staff now.

also, what is your citizenship? what sort of passport(s) do you have? if you have (perhaps a second) EU citizenship, then you can't be treated differently to other EU citizens, that is, the clause that "residency for sake of education does not count" would not apply to you.

and then, the exact requirements change faster than the NERC guidelines. you could check out www.ukcosa.org and/or call them, they can be very helpful.

at my old university in switzerland, they once conducted a representative study on "issues and resources" of students. note here that they studied roughly 20-26 year old "masters" students (we didn't have bachelors but studied 5-6 years to directly reach a masters which was to a huge part independent study and research orientated). so in some sense it might be similar to PhD-situations here (not in all senses, of course).
anyway they found that overall, confidence dropped throughout the studies, the longer someone had been studying, the less likely they were to "say something" in seminars, and the more likely they would doubt their abilities, etc.
so, whilst i def. agree that it goes up and down depending on current happenings - i wouldn't count on confidence going up automatically with time.

pamw, i think you should insist on getting some sort of marking frame/criteria. these should be known to the students too, actually, so if your course convenor resists your enquiries, you could tell your students to flood him/her with requests. that might work better.

i was provided with a quite useful "essay feedback and mark sheet" that helped me look at different aspects of the essays such as structure, clarity, critical thought, how precisely the given question was addressed/answered, referencing and bibliography, etc.
i could explain more about that or send it to you, if the PGFT lets us exchange e-mails. but first of all i would try to get something like that from the course convenor or from the department.

hypothesis, my ticket into zone 6 costs me 90.-/month, for the rest of the journey i get a 6-zones student oyster season ticket (120.-/month).
like you, i am really annoyed: the trains give student rebates on single tickets only, not on season tickets. TFL on the other hand gives student rebates on season tickets only, not on single tickets. meaning that the cheapest way to get to uni is by getting single train tickets and a TFL season ticket. but then, the rebates are only valid after a certain time, so all in all, i end up paying nearly exactly as much as anybody else. they talk alot about student rebates but actually, it's hard to really pay less. you can pay less if you sleep till lunchtime every day. now doesn't that reinforce negative stereotypes of student life.

i try to keep the bigger picture, too. just sometimes, the bigger picture is a bit depressing (why am I doing the PhD at my age? because i want to try for a career in academia. so i can't lose any more time. so i need to be very fast and efficient now and do everything at once!)
but i am staying sane, i believe, most of the time anyway. in some sense the PhD helps me to keep my sanity. in my last 8-5 job i had quite some trouble with sleeping, which didn't help with my mental health. now, when i can't sleep, i stay at home longer in the morning. i get the same amount of work done but at different times and am not over-tired all the time.
i also had a job at some time, with a lot of responsability, for a company, for people. that was very stressful. now, doing the PhD, i am responsible to myself and my research, that is a lot more manageable and indeed helps to keep me sane!

chris, i'm a fraud too. so that makes two of us.

now we just need to figure out how we can fool everyone until we are done.

i once read a book called "uni-fear and uni-bluff" (but in German) that was written by an established professor who said that he STILL feels like a fraud. he still feels he is only bluffing. but it seems to be good enough! sometimes you need to trust other people's evaluation of you - especially if you tend to be overly critical of yourself. they have the experience and all - if they say it's fine, then it's fine, even if to you it feels like you are a fraud.