you can apply to a 1+3 from AHRC. that would fund your MA plus your 3 years PhD. intense competition, though!
most people i know took up a loan for their MA/MSc. others do it part-time in two years. that's not too bad - most people I met who did that were quite happy with it!

i think there are no typical working hours for PhD students in general, though there might be at your department.
as you won't have the chance to teach undergraduate classes, it being postgraduate only, you might want to look into tutoring for the open university.
you could also do admin work for any of your colleges' departments.
from this term onwards, i'm going to be doing 2h/week of "CV checking" for our careers service.
do you know any foreign languages? you could apply to your language centre.
build on your strenghts: do you always proof-read all your friends work because you are so good at it? offer this as a service to international students.
let everyone know that you are looking for sources of income. there might be many odd little jobs cropping up, like, typing data, looking after experiments, collect photocopies of articles, administrate the online learning environment... but only if people know you're looking for that kind of stuff!

hi nofel,
i think in general, as long as you are not asking for money, that is, you are just applying for a place as PhD student but not for funding, it is not too hard to get in. they like having lots of paying students. just fill in the online application form. if you have good grades and a project which matches one staff's interests, you have good chances.

however the LSE is not very good at providing funding. so if you are applying for a funded place, you might find that competition is fierce. in my department there are 2 ESRC funded places/year and perhaps one or two people who get "full" funding from the school/department, compared to about 22 who start every year. and that's not counting those who don't start because they applied for but didn't get funding.

doc, interesting problem. i'm in a similar field - although nominally in sociology, my supervisor is mostly an anthropologist and i am using mostly anthropological theories, and am studying medicine (reproductive medicine). won't be doing focus groups but rather interviews, but have the same problem of drawing people to the subtle things.
i will think about your question - but right now have a deadline looming, so it coud take a while. am interested what anybody else has to say, too!

for me it was 5000 words after 8 months plus "viva", this is in my case not to be confused with the upgrade though, which will involve three full chapters of the thesis, outlines of the rest of the thesis, and a slightly more formal "viva" than the first one. the latter to be submitted sometime around the end of year two.

hey there, first of all, good luck with the start of your PhD!

well at some German universities the heating and electricity is turned off for two weeks at christmas/new year in order to save some money. everything is closed and no-one can come in expect with special permits.

haven't heard anything similar in the UK yet. still: in general, if you are unfunded, I'd say you come and go as you wish. one of my first-year friends last year came back as late as 20th January! even if you are fully funded (check your funding contract for details!), unless there are some critical experiments going on at the time, no-one will expect you to be in before the new year!

or you can think about the narrative structure: if you are studying an event, you can distinguish between things that happen before the event, the event itself, things that are contemporary to the event, and outcomes after the event.

i agree with the brainstorming-then-structuring approach. another way would be to go from large to small: for example from broad topics to subtopics, or from centuries to decades... think about if you want to proceed "chronologically" or by "topic/theme"...
another thing i find useful:
distinguish between "type a questions", "type b questions", and "aspects of the case" (where type a is very general - you want to address but not answer this question as it is too broad, type b is more specific - the questions you want to answer so that you can address type a, and aspects are the things you actually need to find out in order to answer type b)

check out the international federation of university women IFUW. i think the next deadline is on 1st october so you'd have to hurry!

wow, what a debate
matt, just a comment: you smile at how easy it is to taunt o.stoll. well, as anyone who has been around here for a while knows, it IS easy to taunt o.stoll. i have developed a grudging respect for him as he does not shy away from saying unpopular things and WILL rise to "taunts" - although i don't always agree with him and sometimes feel it would have made things easier if he'd just said what he had to say in slightly kinder words.
what i find kind of funny myself is the way you yourself are drawn in to the game. to me, you make a strong impression of a person who enjoys leading someone on in debate, who enjoys demonstrating how clever you are and how superior... hey, you lead a whole late-night debate on whether o.stoll's post was appropriate. basically, i think, simply because neither of you could grant the other the "last word". you couldn't state what you had to say and leave it at that, you HAD to reply to each other's replies...
i'll shut up now

no, you can't be sue, you're oz.
um. i guess the number of my remaining brain cells is also in question.

for clarification: read the first sentence of the "puzzle" ("Imagine...") and then skip over everything until the last sentence ("How old...")

I thought that's how academics work - read the intro and the conclusions and nothing else? did my best to add lots of useless confusing stuff in the middle, seems to have worked

maybe i'll adapt that strategy for my thesis...

are you SURE it's not full moon? looks like an awfully full moon to me!

well, if's and when's... i thought i'd made clear that tricky IS the captain - or anyone else who wants to solve the "puzzle"... and i thought i'd made it impossible with the rest of the information to find out anything about the age of the captain? or did i mess it up?

hey o.stoll. i spent the night sleepless, too. didn't turn my computer on though, so didn't see your post!

hope you found some sleep eventually.

i heard that air pressure situations can make people sleepless. or simply: stress?

tricky, i don't know - you tell me! for me the answer is 31.

well oz that's why i made it REAL easy. just look at the first sentence and the last. the rest is befuddlement.