yes, you can apply to several funding sources. you should, too, as each individual application can, of course, fail.

it does not hurt to apply to several universities, either. being fully funded at the second best university choice is probably more promising than being unfunded at your first choice.

interesting. at my department it is like this: funded 3 years, expected to finish in 4 years, fail if not finished after 6 years.

all the staff who advises us on how to successfully complete a PhD in 3-4 years have themselves taken 6-10 years to get there. they are basically always telling us "don't do it like i did". needless to say that our PhDs are going to be of a different type than their's were.

hm, it's always a gamble with those funding applications! a lot of work, and often no results. if you are going to invest money, too, that would be really scary for me.
is there not any possibility to take those modules at your current university? that would count, no? then it would be free. moneywise, anyway. you'd still have to study and take the exams, but you'd learn something, too.
on the side, my supervisor is always telling me she thinks i have good chances. but it usually didn't work out anyway. she ended up "confessing" that applying for funding is like throwing a ball of paper over your head into a bin behind you. you do get better at it, but it is till to a large extent pure luck.

btw i totally agree with o.stoll that the whole reputation of anyone (uni, department, supervisor, external, ...) won't help you at all if you don't get that PhD in the first place. so all previous advice was meant on the condition that the situation will be favourable enough for you to safely be able to complete your PhD in any of the choices.
given that you are aiming at a non-academic career however i disagree with o.stoll - except if you are going into an area which is stronly related to academia, the reputation of your supervisor will in many cases hardly mean anything to prospective employers. especially if you are moving around geographically. thus i guess the ideal would be a supportive, helpful supervisor (experienced or not, you get good and bad both) in a uni with a good name.
so try to find out as much as possible about your potential supervisors no matter where you go!

i would say that the reputation of the supervisor is very important. it is he/she who will be writing references for you and it just makes a huge difference if the reference is from a "nobody" or from a famous person. but being young and inexperienced in supervising PhD students doesn't mean they are "nobodys" nor that they will be bad supervisors, so consider this to.
the reputation of the university probably matters most for non-academic careers, and overseas academic positions/funding agencies. for local academic careers, you might find that the reputation of the department is more important than the reputation of the university.

i've just started using atlas.ti and it seems to be fine so far. i think NVivo and atlas.ti and Alceste for that matter don't do the exact same things, so you should check them out not for how many people use them - but for what you want to do with them.

sometimes we have to choose between two bad (or, imperfect) choices. when we make the choice that is best for ourselves, others might not understand why we choose at all. it can be very tough to have to admit to oneself that the perfect dream isn't coming true. then to have to explain this to someone else is even worse. especially to people who believe in you. good luck with it all and let us know how it developes!

hi jojo,
congrats on the interview! i'd say, you know best what you want to do. just don't start thinking "i have to take this job because it is the only choice" - only take it if you think it might work out well.

when i had run out of money earlier this year i mentioned to my parents that (although i really want to do a PhD) if i didn't get any funding from anywhere, i would have to give up and do something else, simply to avoid starving, if you know what i mean. their reaction was simply denial. "we don't want this to be true so it can't be true. you will get funding, we can't believe you won't". it's great that they believe in me and in this case it turned out they were right... but it didn't help at the time! it just built the pressure to find a solution to a situation that seemed unsolvable.

hm, that's always hard!

how about you run your entire thesis through atlas.ti's word cruncher. filter out all "little" words like and, such, is, etc. and then use those words that appear most frequently to build a title.
or
your conclusion in a way summarises your thesis. your abstract perhaps summarises your conclusions. your title might summarize your abstract. go step by step, reducing your thesis from 100'000 words to finally those select few which are so central that they belong in the title.

hey chris,
depending how formal the thing is, i handle it differently. if it is really important to me that i make a good impression, i will write it out, THEN from the written out text create prompts. i take the written text with me for "emergencies" - if you don't know what to do you can always just start reading.
if it is less formal and more about "learning" and thinking through stuff together with other people, and i don't have too much time, i'll just think about what should go into the presentation and make prompts, but won't write it all out.
good luck!

cs, you say "I don't think it's right to make the PhD a more valuable qualification by letting fewer people do it. That's the point I'm mainly disagreeing with."
well, to get away from that bourdieu discussion which is really off-topic: let me say that i do not think it's right to make the PhD more valuable by letting fewer people do it any more than you do. i do not believe that that is what bourdieu says, as you apparently do, but i believe we can happily disagree on this point - what bourdieu said and what not - and do not need to further pursue it here.
i see a problem perhaps if a PhD has no value because it doesn't mean anything - if it doesn't mean you learned anything nor that you did some research. why get a title if it doesn't signal anything at all? then you'd be better off putting your time into attaining skills and showing people what you know in other ways. i do not think it's quite that bad yet, though.

a friend of mine has her first year funded by a foundation which does not usually fund PhDs at all. she sent a speculative application, and i suppose having some contacts within the foundation might have helped, and they obviously liked her project so made an exception.

btw, just so you don't get confused:

in some cases, women/gender studies PhDs, since gender studies are quite inter- or multi- or transdisciplinary, are not funded by the ESRC but rather by the AHRC (gender history projects, gender art, gender literature, gender cultural studies...). only if you look at gender from a social science perspective will it fall into the ESRC area.

on bourdieu - i agree that his style of writing is a weak point of his (he has many; many other scholars share this particular weakness). but that doesn't mean that what he said is wrong. it is a bit odd to argue that because someone doesn't write well the content must be rubbish.
i do not agree with everything he said, mind, but i do find some of his contributions to social science very valuable and thus found your reaction to me mentioning bourdieu to symbolize a widespread academic fallacy - speak derisively but superficially about someone else and you avoid the need to engage with their work, making yourself seem important and knowledgeable at the same time.
that's quite what you did as you did not refer at all to the concept mentioned but rather put the whole of bourdieu's work in question due to a supposed "lack of empirical research" and his complicated writing.

so you are saying that basic research in the sciences is good, but not in the social sciences. because in the sciences something unexpected and valuable might come from originally strange, seemingly pointless research. but not so in the social sciences, is that what you are saying? i guess so, because otherwise your argument makes no sense.
which implies that you think that SocSci only has any value when it addresses current social issues. we discussed this before and i think i remember you agreed that "some" research could be valuable even if it didn't address current issues.
you set basic SocSci research equal to "ivory tower" research. just fyi i agree with your derision of "ivory tower" research. but i do not agree that all basic SocSci research is suchlike.
which leads back to my point that scholarly independence is necessary and the value of research cannot be measured by its foreseen return on investment, and i hold this to be true for the SocSci as well, as argued.