I think this depends on the subject maybe. For me in a Science subject, I found a searchable reference manager like Mendeley to be all I needed. I annotated the PDFs in it if needed. For me, it's much quicker when I know I've read something somewhere, but can't remember where. I can't see how that would work if I was printing everything.

It's still early days and with Christmas etc you may not hear back from a while. If you are not selected for interview, you may not hear back at all. i would keep applying elsewhere in the meantime.

Depends on the uni. Mine did.

Congrats Dr Pjlu!

Well, look at it this way, the starting salary for a postdoc in a university is ~£30k. Postdocs in Kew Gardens were recently advertised for £32k.

Lecturers earn a minimum of £38k at my uni.

I'd love to meet a fresh PhD graduate on £47k. Hopefully they will bring their flying pig with them when I do.

findaphd.com and jobs.ac.uk advertise everything. They are the only sites you need.

You can filter on the first one to only show funded PhDs. You can narrow it done to research area or region of the UK on either site.

I found that Mendeley added most (up to five?) authors upon first citation, and then after that I modified it manually to say et al. I'm not sure if there's a way to make it do this automatically, but amending it manually was quick so it wasn't an issue for me. These changes remained, unless changes to the bibliography itself which got deleted every time Mendeley refreshed.

I doubt there's a country in Europe where every single student receives a stipend. In the UK, EU people apply for PhDs that come with a stipend and if they are successful at interview, then they get the PhD and are awarded the stipend. Most non-EU students are self-funded or are paid by their employer or government, so they do not get stipends. Other students without stipends will pay from their savings or via loans, which is not recommended.

Can you cope with working 15 - 20 a week every week for 6-8 years on top of your day job? That seems a lot of pressure to me.

As for job prospects afterwards, the academic job market is dire, but with your experience I don't think it would be a problem, especially if it's not academia you're aiming for. I'm not sure what help a PhD would be though.

Anyone on here with a research background in Education know any more?