If you get a Nature paper in three years you will be the best student ever... seriously, good luck with that!

But, what you are experiencing is completely normal. I'm a postdoc and I still feel as if I know next to nothing. These feelings are hard to shake. All you can do is keep reading, discussing, thinking and writing and remember that most people feel exactly the same as you.

Yes you are right, I didn't mention that I changed my objectives, I just rephrased my objectives around my data... My supervisors encouraged this - after all, if I set objective A in my first year, but didn't do it and did objective B instead, the thesis might end up looking a bit odd.

I'm not sure it is so much of an issue. I've always been told that thesis questions will change as the research evolves, based on what results are found and what the literature holds.

Hiya, what an extensive process for a PhD! I've heard of this for faculty positions, but not for PhDs before.

I expect this will take the form of you doing a departmental presentation, meeting with the lab, meeting with other students, and possibility meeting staff one on one. There will certainly be lunches and dinners too.

Best advice is remember that you are being interviewed the whole time, even when out for lunch or drinks in the evening. They are trying to see whether you will fit in the lab so try to get on with everyone and make them like you. Don't talk about controversial issues and maybe be careful of agreeing with unusual points of view - they might just be testing you.

Staying with your supervisor adds to the difficulty too - I've had to do this when visiting a lab and I must say I found it quite awkward. I think I just enquired about what I should do about shower/breakfast etc to make it easier.

Never heard of NVivo, but then I didn't really make notes as you are describing during my PhD. I just used Mendeley for PDFs of papers and excel for all my data.

This experience is quite common in research. People go for many years with things not working until it all comes together in the end.

You probably won't fail, you will just get a grace period and have to come up with a detailed plan to get back on track. The viva might yield some helpful direction? Or is there anyone else you could speak to in the mean time to try to get some results or get your technique to work?

I found my postdoc on jobs.ac.uk. I would like to stay in academia but I can't because I'm not prepared to travel round forever so I'm currently looking for an administration job in a university.

I think it's because most people on here are in the UK so can't really comment, plus there's not many doing an industrial PhD.

Didn't get it :( Went to someone with a background in the particular field, so fair enough.

I've applied for 2 other jobs now, and I'm on the look out for more, so hopefully will find something soon,

Are you sure you have the 'final show mark up' option selected in Word?

She might have done it using track changes but you just can't see it.

And I agree with Hugh, I love it when supervisors rewrite my sentences because it helps me to improve my writing. Sometimes they edit it incorrectly as well, which generally shows the way I have written it is so unclear that even they can't understand what I'm on about, which is also very helpful!

If you don't like it though, just tell her. Say that you are grateful for her comments but everyone has their own writing style... but if you get picked up on in your viva for poor writing you would then only have yourself to blame...

I think it depends on the uni. At my uni, both minor and majors constitute a pass because if you do the corrections to the satisfaction of the examiners you will pass. The only difference is whether or not you can graduate yet.

Technically though, even you get no corrections at viva, you haven't passed until the exam board has met and has confirmed you have passed. You can't graduate until the exam board has confirmed your pass. Exam boards generally meet every few months.

Maybe check your university guidebook?

Generally, yes. If you do the corrections as requested you will pass. But at my university you couldn't graduate until your corrections were signed off, but you could if you had minor corrections.

However, I have seen on here that some people were given majors, and then somehow this got changed to revise and resubmit when the external wasn't happy with the corrections made.

No I haven't tried that. A lot of jobs I'm applying to state they that they can't give feedback at the initial application stage, only after an unsuccessful interview. But I guess it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Thanks, that's interesting to me because I applied for a particular role recently that I had the skill set for and more than enough experience for but I didn't get an interview. I've now seen that it is been re-advertised so they obviously didn't get the person they were looking for.

As this was a team leader role from the same uni that I recently graduated from my PhD from, and considering I spent two years in a team manager role prior to starting my PhD, I put it down to being both overqualified and over-experienced. I guess it's not easy to predict why hiring managers make these decisions.

Oh well, their loss is someone else's gain. At some point I hope...