Blimey, you're right, what happened?

Ahh, but if you want to watch the live stream you need to have a TV licence. Bizarrely (and rather welcomely), you don't need a TV licence to see "watch again" programmes on Iplayer. 8-)

Hey DJ. I'm not sure the PGF team have entirely answered your question, but the forum is all shiny and new right now. If you're still receiving notification emails drop by and say hi.

Things are going okay with me, never as well as planned, but that's a PhD for you. The question now is, can I exorcise DJWickid from the forum after life? Here goes....

Yes, we tend to start thinking we're going to work hard everyday and that we'll stay motivated for the duration. You'll probably find you work in waves. Some people have some days where there on it and some days when they just can't get going. In my case, it scales up to weeks. I had 3 good weeks in a row, but this week I've struggled to motivate myself. Just accept you can't be perfect all the time.

As has been suggested already, spend the first weeks being a "yes" man/woman in terms of going out and getting involved in activities. It's a great way to make friends and to settle in. Also, feeling like a fraud is normal at first, you'll soon find your way.

Welcome back Ann. It's like a PGF reunion on here at the moment. Quite a few posters who have been quiet have suddenly resurfaced. Is this a flying visit or can we expect to see you as a regular again?

A couple of points here. I generally think that the supervisor is more important than the university so don't get too hung up on the prestige of that uni. I know of one former polytechnic in my field which has some of the biggest names in the field working in a large research group together. In the same field I know a prestigious university with one, middling potential supervisor.

Secondly, doing a PhD is blooming expensive, so ignoring a funded opportunity to work with an energetic, well known supervisor for an unfunded one at a prestigious university seems a bad choice, to me anyway.

To be blunt, Masters programmes are a cash cow for many universities, so I would be very surprised if at least one didn't accept you. I can only assume that the programmes you did apply for must have been the most prestigious ones and have filled up for the year. Likewise, a 2:2 shouldn't be a barrier. A phone call or two would indeed be a good idea.

Yes, I'm about 550 behind so not likely to challenge her supremacy. I wonder what the board would look like with DanB's total posts on here?

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I must have a face perfect for web forums ;-)

The whole ethos is different to what is here. The nature of that website is that you can't really hide behind your anonymity, so you have to post as yourself. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, other than if you use the forum or blog you can't "sound off" about things. It could be a roaring success but as far as I can see there isn't a great deal of traffic passing through there right now. I also think that if collaboration was my target, I'd get a better response going through the mailing lists that I'm a member of. Perhaps the added value might come from cross-discipline sharing of ideas. Let's see...

Seems a good idea. I assume that the mods get final say over whether to approve a star or not?

Well you could have a look at the advertisements on this website. There's also jobs.ac.uk to try. One other possibility is to join the mailing lists of societies related to microbiology as a number of PhD posts get emailed around.