Hmm, it's difficult... Can you do it both ways, her way and the right way? The hopefully she might change her mind once she sees the results?

If not, I don't see what you can do except do what she tells you if you need the money.

You pay tax if you exceed the personal allowance income threshold (currently £10,000 for this tax year). This doesn't make any difference if you are student or not. Check out HMRC's website. If you pay tax when you shouldn't have you can claim it back.

You probably can't continue with it as a student account, but you should be able to convert it to a graduate account, and still have the overdraft, but it probably won't be interest free.

I agree, your boss will not care, but tell them anyway.

Tell that that you will soon have a PhD and you are moving to better things. Tell them that you they should not treat their employees like crap. Tell that you deserve better and so do the rest of their employees.

It totally varies depending upon the discipline, university and supervisors.

If the PhD is lab based, you will probably need to go in every day, including some weekends. You can mainly set your own hours though, if your supervisors don't mind.

In my first year I had only a 2 hour class once a week, and 2 1 hour departmental seminars a week.

I think I generally worked about 6 hours per day in my first year, and about 8-10 hours a day in my second and third years. I attended pretty much every day in every year.

Like Fled says, if there are departmental things happening, you should definitely make an effort to attend as this will raise your profile within the dept and you will probably learn something.

Well, it doesn't sound you had a great experience, but you've learnt something along the way so that's got to count for something.

Only you can make this decision, but my advice would be to take the PD, you can get another industry placement later if needed.

I think if you are planning to go to a uni in Europe, US or Australia etc, you can probably explain about the lack of research output in HK unis and they will understand your reasons for wanting to quit and move to a different uni...

talking to yourself?

Craigslist.com. Everyone in the US uses it. I found a house share on it. They didn't need references or credit check. One person was already renting a place and was looking for more housemates. We had a skype chat and that was that. This was about 1 month before I moved there. I was looking for about 1 month prior to that and had 3 other 'skype' interviews because I was choosy about a place and people were choosy about who they wanted to move in. You can also see apartments advertising directly on there, if you want to live alone.

I set up a bank account on the day I got there. Just walked into a random bank with my UK debit card, passport and driver's licence and that was it. They didn't need any proof of address.

If you have any other questions about moving to the US let me know :)

I'm just a PhD student in California

You can get on a PhD course with a BSc alone, but it will probably make it easier if you have a higher degree as well.

This won't matter, you will have other opportunities. You can always check the program and see if there are any interesting abstracts that are relevant.