No I think that's fine. You can sound out whether they are taking on any students with their own proposals or will advertise positions that they already have funding for.

Express your desire to do a PhD in the lab and see what happens from there. Don't jump in and offer to work weekends if you don't have to. Besides, there's probably only people in the lab most weekends for a couple of hours, if at all, plus they will want to be getting on with their own work and legally you probably shouldn't be the lab unsupervised anyway.

That's brilliant news! :)

Well I can only really comment on the ones at the US university I'm at.

They have different class levels but anyone can take any level class regardless of the degree they are on. There are 3 tiers: lower undergraduate, upper undergraduate and graduate.

MSc and PhD students have to have a certain number of units/classes to pass, and some of these can be the upper undergraduate classes if they didn't take them previously. I attended a few of these lectures and it was very basic so I can't imagine what a lower undergraduate class must be like! I think this is why the graduate level classes are similar to our third year classes. Which if you think about it isn't that surprising - when I took classes for my MSc in the UK the level of difficulty was no different from my third year either.

You are right in that the students can't just take the upper classes though - a certain amount of units has to be from graduate classes in order for them to pass their degree.

There is a lot of arrogance from Americans about every aspect of life. They really do think the US is the centre of the universe and there's something wrong with you if you don't aspire to be like them/their country.

@Fled Inspirational. Thanks :)

Hello,

The only advice I can give is to be careful that you won't regret your decision if you left. It's nice to be earning decent money, and more difficult if you are not when your friends are, however the job market is tough and there are lots of well-qualified people that want promotions. Furthermore, to get a promotion you probably need to work long hours and deal with stress and people's personal problems. What looks like decent money/good job now, might not be in 5 years time if you can't get ahead, then you might wish you had got a PhD. If you have a PhD, at least it's something you have that other candidates don't. On the other hand, it will make you even more overqualified...Also, you are unlikely to get a job in academia anyway, so not wanting to be an academic is not necessarily a reason not to be doing a PhD.

You're the only one that knows if a PhD is right for you. If you think it's the right decision to make, then leave. But don't do this solely because you think the grass is greener in the job market, because it isn't.

I've got an Italian student in my lab in the UK. He's really good. I think you'll be fine as long are you are proficient in English.

As an EU student you can qualify for a stipend if the PhD advert says you can. My Italian friend gets the same as me: 14,000 pounds a year.

I have no knowledge of Germany.

I think it's ok as you make it clear what you have done and what they did. You just need to make sure you are still making a substantial contribution I guess.

Go Trees lol

@deepb I view a person with a PhD as a highly valued member of society that has dedicated several years of their life to the pursuit of knowledge.

I find your attitude and comments very insulting and I sincerely hope you do not get a PhD because you do not deserve one.

Have a nice day.

If this data is a genome sequence then this is fine.

Congrats LoobieLoo! Great to hear success stories!

They normally say something like: 'provide 2 references and one of them should be from your previous supervisor'. Key would being 'should'. It doesn't say 'must'. It's not dishonest to provide another reference, it's going against their request. Dishonest would be giving them a reference saying it's from your supervisor but it's not.

They will wonder why you haven't provided a reference from your supervisor, and then you can explain.

Surely it's better than actually getting a reference from him and him indicating you shouldn't be taken on because you are technically incompetent and difficult to get along with? Who is going to want you as a student after reading that? Unless this supervisor is disliked by the other people in your field and known to be a poor supervisor they are going trust his word, so you are better off not giving them this opportunity.

Does anyone else on this forum have any personal experience of this?

Well I think you have an advantage by knowing the faculty anyway so it's probably not as important for you. If the faculty like you, you are already ahead of the other candidates so I wouldn't worry too much about it being via Skype.

1. What is the single most stressful or frustrating thing about doing a PhD?

I haven't found my PhD stressful. The most frustrating thing is probably repeating experiments again and again when they don't work, but it's also a kind of fun learning process too.

2. What strategies or skills would you most like to learn or improve in order to make this process easier?

I think I have most of the skills required to do a PhD because I worked at managerial level for several years before undertaking my PhD and therefore learnt the soft skills required to deal with supervisors, stress, difficult people and situations, high work loads, criticism, rejection etc etc

3. If you could improve or change anything about doing a PhD what would it be?

I would ensure that everyone had 4 years of funding to make it easier to write a thesis and papers in the fourth year. Also might be nice to have decent job prospects afterwards. Also I think some supervisors need managerial training to manage their students effectively as this would avoid a lot of problems and increase productivity.

4. If you were starting over, which 2 or 3 things would you do differently?

I would increase my basic scientific knowledge by taking chemistry and molecular biology classes so that I would have had a better basis to start from and would have made more progress from day 1.

Apart from that, I love my PhD so I wouldn't change anything.