I think the difference in, say 'employability' between PhDs from Cambridge or Central Lancashire will be considerably smaller than the equivalent for undergraduate degrees.

Let's say you have a BSc, then employers will be considerably more likely to look favourably on a candidate who graduated from Oxbridge than someone with the same degree grade from a minor university, primarily because so many people have degrees these days and so the graduating institution becomes a way of weeding out competition.

For PhD, I'd wager that the originating institution would matter less to an employer since you'd be a qualified doctoral-level researcher, and plus there's fewer PhD graduates so the 'competition' from others is less important.

I try and keep the 8/8/8 schedule. I also use the mytomatoes/pomodoro to make sure those 8 hours of work are being used productively, so if I don't make it past my goal (usually 10-12 a day) then I have to eat into my leisure time, hence motivation to work harder in my 8 hour work day!

The quote ("you can tell that some of the PhD students just don't want to be here, you can see they don't want to come in and they are only hear from 9-5. If you want to make a difference you have to put in the time.") is quite representative of some academics' opinions of postgrad students, that they're there to be working 24/7 largely to further the academic's research profile. My sups have never encouraged me to overwork and value leisure time, so don't take comments like that too much to heart. Leisure time is important, and I never work well when I'm tired and stressed so value my leisure time and getting enough sleep.

@Escoppycoppy: How did you structure this? My sups are too busy for me to just be able to drop in and chat so it's easier to book a time each week to discuss work. We usually spend 30-60 mins a week though, plus e-mail (although both my sups are not great at responding quickly to email, though they always respond within a day or two).

Does this mean you had lots of short-term (24 hour) goals that you worked on before you met again, or was it ongoing work that you relayed back on and discussed several times a week?

Thanks, Screamingaddabs, that's a really good idea. I can see that working for me (and also giving me someone to chat to who may be able to put thing into perspective), so I'll think about sorting that out :-)

I think one of the things I'm not enjoying is the lack of motivation or anyone 'prodding' me into doing work - I coped reasonably well at undergrad stage with working on my own at a project, but I had lectures and coursework to guide me into doing stuff, whereas my PhD work is largely solitary apart from meeting(s) with my supervisor(s) once a week. When I meet them, it's not like they say "Do this, do that, I want this by next week", they're very relaxed and say "Have a think about this, what about that?". I can find it difficult to motivate myself to do work when I don't see results instantaneously (or soon) or when I don't have anything _particular_ to do (just a lot of things I need to look at). I also take my sup's relaxed attitude and lack of "orders" to mean that I'm failing or not doing things properly, which can be counter-productive and also lower my motivation.

I enjoy the lifestyle - Working on my own for long periods of time, not having anyone on my back, but the lack of negative (constructive) feedback sometimes leads me to think that I'm doing things wrong but they're too nice to tell me! The lack of pressure from anyone is good, but that leads me to put on great amounts of (even more) pressure on myself, to the point when I don't know when a job's done or when I've earned a break.

Thought I'd pose the question to find out if there's anyone out there who's a year or more down the line and still actively enjoying what they do.

Maybe there are large chunks of work that are not enjoyable (in my case, almost-constant chunks of work which are deeply deeply not-enjoyable) with sporadic 'enjoyable' bits, or maybe you're one of those weird people who live all their work?

Am I alone in hating having to do what I'm doing? Am I mad? :$

@Ady: And very gratefully received! :-)

Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as ungrateful or disinterested or offend! I guess being cooped up in the office all day and not making any progress in the last couple of days have made me a bit temperamental :$

This is kind of a personal response to this comment so I'm semi-hijacking the thread from Nastassia, but thought I'd write it here in case others relate to my situation.

One of the problems I'm finding at the moment is that I'm currently having a major headache finding data - I've undertaken a case study into collecting data from the literature in order to analyse it and come up with a set of requirements.

Problem is, I'm not having a great deal of success in finding the data I want; I've been using my PDF library and Google and textbooks and searching through promising references and have probably skim-read or properly-read through 200-300 articles looking for data. I've got some out, but I just can't get any real 'meaty' stuff, probably because it isn't there or because my PhD is to find a better way of obtaining that data (hence why I need the requirements), so I'm in a bit of a vicious circle and getting stressed out because what I want isn't there. The nature of my project means I don't have the resources to go and collect any new data on it, either.

And I'm worried that it's _my_ fault I can't find the data; as if the search terms I'm using are not right, or that the information is in papers I've already read but I somehow missed it. This has taken me two weeks so far of solid reading and not finding what I want/need is very demoralising, and difficult to pick oneself back up from. I feel like it's my fault though, as if I need to spend every waking hour looking for it and not spend my leisure time doing leisure things. It's massive dispiriting.

Hi Snasreen7, sorry I didn't reply sooner, so busy!

I spent most of my first 9 months reading, and since then have had bouts of 3 months (primarily) reading, 3 months (primarily) doing other stuff, 3 months reading, etc. etc. Even though I'm 23 months in, I'm still finding so much that I need to look at, I think one of the problems I find about the PhD is that it you can't know _everything_ that you need to know to get through the thesis and viva - It's not like school studies where there's a syllabus and you'll only get examined on the stuff in it.

Then again, that means that when you can't really be 'wrong' - I always start to write by tackling something that I either know about or about stuff that's well-covered in the literature and easy to find (close to hand) ~ It's a cliche, but writing the introduction first is good in order to focus what you actually want to saying and what you want your finished written document to tell the reader (be it new data, new theories, whatever). I always brainstorm with about 20 x A4 sheets and jot down everything that comes into my head about what I want to discuss, and then look at what I need to say to get there.

I've always been told that the thesis should be like a story - Telling not just what you found out but also what you did and why you did it. Even if things didn't work or you went down false alleys, then writing about what you learned is still just as valid: You can never be 'wrong', so as long as you justify what you did and have something to say (e.g. 'I found this out!' or 'I found out that doing this experiment is a waste of time!' or 'I didn't find much out, but I did find this out') is all valid.

I'm quite lucky in that I've always been okay with writing and happy with my output, but when I get writer's block I like to draw diagrams and scribble on pages and looking at it the next day I might find inspiration in the scrawl and think of a bunch of things to write about! My office wall is covered in bits of paper that I randomly look up at every so often and come across something I can write about. Writing can be a pain, but it definitely gets easier in time. I've improved so much since the start of my PhD, and I'm sure you will, too. Good luck!

"Does Anyone Else Feel Like They're Not Good Enough For Their PhD And Not Doing It Justice?"

In short, yes.

I'm 23 months down the line and just submitted by upgrade from MPhil to PhD. I wish I knew what I was doing, and a lot of the time I'm floundering and not really sure what I should spend time on. Supervisors are great but I always feel bad by not going to them with either some (good) new work, or questions and queries - A lot of the time I feel that my results are either not very good, or I don't understand them enough to be able to ask questions! I'm in a slightly new area (for me at least) and nestled between 3 relatively large fields so I feel out on a limb. I want to feel like I'm making a contribution, but I kind of feel blindfolded and not sure where to go.

The (perceived, in my eyes) lack of progress makes me feel that it's _my_ fault the project hasn't made leaps forward - like, anyone else doing the same project would have finished it already or made worthwhile progress. It's very demoralising, and makes me feel stressed and panicky about work each day is I worry that today'll be another day where nothing progresses, or the day that my supervisors suss me out that I'm just a fraud and kick me out!

I'm on a full-time funded MPhil/PhD program (studentship) so I get my meagre stipend every month, which is enough for me to live on.

I've been thinking a lot about why I feel so stressed about doing my PhD (even when all my supervisors are on holiday and I've no-one on my back to submit work or upcoming deadlines), and one of the conclusions I have come to is that I can't afford to go into nominal year (not getting paid), and I'm covertly stressed (already a year early) that I won't finish in time and that I'll have to either drop the PhD because I have no money, or get into a lot of debt paying rent, bills, food, etc.

I'm also terrified of failing the PhD 'milestones' (transfer to PhD, yearly reports) not necessarily because of the prospect of failing (though that comes into it too) but because if they fail me or cut my funding, I'll have to look elsewhere for work and will feel as though the (so far) two years will have been worthless - There's a fear that employers see that you were doing a PhD but dropped out, and it'll put them off.

Does anyone else have similar worries, or experience with these kind of things?



(in other news, I'm also stressed that my 'contribution' to my field is not going to be significant enough based on results/work so far, but that's a whole other story!)

I've just come out of a writing-up period where I was doing easily more than 10 tomatoes a day. I'm back to normal work and have found myself in lit-survey territory again (searching for data in tons of papers in Mendeley...time consuming) and have seen my tomato levels drop.

Today I had a bit of a panic and decided to abandon the office and come home, so my tomato level has dropped even more and I'm only on 9 so far.

I've seen a lot of people aiming for 10 tomatoes a day and wonder how your days of work are structured? Obviously not everyone is full-time or sits at a desk for, say, hours a day (they may be in the lab and so 'tomato time' may convert so well), so how does the tomato count represent how much time you spent 'at' your PhD (either on-campus or working from home)?

I guess I'm just trying to get a handle on my time-tomato conversion rate compared with others - Again, obviously everyone's PhD is different and so you can't apply the same timescales to work, but I'd just like to reassure myself that the time I put in is equating to "hard work", even if my output/results may not show much!

Yeah, I have a pretty good relationship with my supervisors - They're both very experienced and ones I knew from my undergrad days, and they certainly know what's required of a PhD student and have plenty to compare with me and my current level of work.

They're both very supportive and say that what I have so far is fine, but I'm just a little concerned that, because I've broached the subject of stress and worry about progress levels before, they're just saying "everything's fine" to limit damage and stop me worrying so much - They're almost _too_ nice about it and _too_ reassuring that I think they must be bending the truth for me to aid my mental state. It's a weird state of thinking I know, but I've always been cynical of things like this and getting over it is tough!