hi emmaki,
as you are a EU citizen, then, provided you have been resident in the EU for the last three years, you will pay home fees, not overseas fees.
however the amount varies per university and within universities, per subject. so the only thing to do is check out the universities/courses you are interested in, there should be information on their homepages. i am currently paying ca. £3200.- per year but as i said, that might vary considerably.
don't forget to consider the living costs. london is very expensive, outside of london it is considerably cheaper to live.

hey chris, what is it about today? i slept enough but my brain is mush. i need something stronger than chocolate!

i suspect i am suffering an essay-marking overdose. teaching this morning was baaad... i hardly was able to get correct words out of my mouth, and totally unable to make sense of what the students were saying. does anyone know a way, apart from illegal substances, to get my brain working again? it really, quite scarily, feels like it is "out of order". give me that chocolate you are resisting!

sorry rick, my interviews are yet in the future. i'm interested in any response as well!

hope your work is going well and you could use the recording although the quality was not perfect.

i haven't published yet. my partner however published one short article (a "comment") as first author in a high impact journal. he is currently finishing his PhD which will probably be awarded in march or so. he has 3 more publications in the "pipeline" 2 of which will probably appear within a year.
it was likely the high impact journal publication which got him the lecturer job he has now.

sorry pamw for sort of hijacking your thread.

ok, i don't really want to say that you don't have to know anything about the topic. i guess at the minimum you need an idea of the discipline in general, good guidance from the course convenor as to the aims and objectives of the course, and you need to stay ahead of the students in your reading on the particular topic. knowing your stuff will make teaching easier. from a certain point on i just think that knowing your stuff better won't make you teach better, but people skills/didactics will.
(the less guidance you get from the course convenor, the more you need to know yourself in order to decide which points to get across)
i totally agree also that graduate teaching assistants take the slack from hardly nobody else caring about teaching. we (sometimes) get bad advice/teaching/guidance in our own studies but are expected on the other hand to deliver quality teaching and to pick up the pieces from others' bad teaching due to their low investment.

blueberry i agree that universities should not sell what they don't deliver. i am not so sure about having to know more about a specific topic than the students do. there is a whole theory of learning behind it: the classes are explicitly meant, in my case, NOT to lecture students, but to provide students with an opportunity to think and discuss about things in small groups and thus develop their own knowledge in a more deep-going way than passiv consumption of knowledge. that's why class teachers are not supposed to be teachers but rather facilitators. the key skills class teachers need are didactic, people skills (i know, many do lack these). from this perspective you could say that any class teacher who lectures the students cheats them of an opportunity to actively learn. knowing the topic i teach quite well i confess that it's sometimes easier, and takes less preparation than holding a class that will truly inspire the students to think by themselves.

indeed i am!!!

(cabbage)
(salad)
(leaf)

(just for experimentation's sake)

Anyway, if you can't make a good case that english is your "first" language OR that you have taken university level education in a english speaking country, then you need the TOEFL. If the situation is unclear, ask the university you are applying to directly. If you don't get good answers, perhaps you should just go ahead and take the test. Or you can wait to see if they accept you (conditionally on your TOEFL) first, to save the expenses of the test in case they don't offer you a place.

About two years ago I also wanted to find out if I needed a TOEFL or not. As TOEFL stands for "Test of English as a Foreign Language" and my mother tongue is English but my "father tongue" is not and I did not grow up in an English-speaking country, and did not know if I should put my "first" language as English (it is chronologically my first but in ability the other language has a slight edge), I thought I'd inquire. I sent the place I was applying to specific e-mails and filled in online forms and did all the right things but never got a single reply. The uni got some bad points on a feedback survey for that

ok - i've never really caught on about the smiley things. but it's never too late to start. here i go.


(food)
(cake)

so, now let's see what happens. and btw i'm winning.

there is no obvious favoritism. UK citizens have to fulfil the same criteria to get the full studentship (three years residency).

if you have been registered at a UK university that should serve to "prove" your residency. if you have been working perhaps you have a work contract or your boss would write a letter stating that you have been working for them. if you have not been studying nor working what have you been doing?
if you have been renting perhaps your landlord could write a letter for you. do you have a tax self-declaration from that time? have your parents been living in the UK and do they have a work contract or something?

o.stoll i agree but then i don't. i guess there are several issues here. for one, how are you going to learn how to study without actually doing it? so if you're teaching the students how to study you'd best do it by making them study (with guidance on the how) and that will mean that they automatically pick up some "content", too. another point is that how are they ever supposed to really learn "content" if they never learn how to study (how to meaningfully read an article for example)? they can just learn to throw back at you what you make them learn by heart. some might learn how to study in time but overall i think you'll be more efficient if you teach them how to study and then profit from them knowing how to study. or something like that, i guess i'm waffling a bit, has been a long day

as for the original question - which was actually not if it is ok to take time off or not, at all, it was about what to do - i'd suggest, if you are taking time off, to do something totally un-related to your PhD. my favourite is always a cycle tour, that's cheap and can be any length of time from 3 days to 3 months. and you can stop whenever you've had enough. if it needs to be really cheap, start from right where you are. else, you can go somewhere specific, for example follow the danube, or the atlantic coast, or finland, or or or...

plan some time for getting back into your topic after an extended time away from it. but also, this fresh view might prove an advantage!

hmm... i am currently working on a publication totally not related to my PhD. i'm not doing it all alone though, but together with my boyfriend. i told my supervisor about it and she likes it and encouraged me to go ahead with it but did raise some cautionary words about it not supposing to distract me too much from my PhD project. but, frankly, that's exactly what it is doing - at the end of the day, if it's going to be up to standard for publication it is going to take a lot of work.
if you go ahead with this i would be interested in your experience!