Sorry for not replying back sooner. My funding was via an external doctoral fellowship rather than a university scheme. My funder paid my fees, costs for some external courses, conferences and research costs and the salary I was on before starting my PhD and included pension and the relevant incremental annual rises / pay increases for my grade. There may be similar schemes in your field but they are very competitive. Mine involved working with my proposed supervisors in advance to submit a full research proposal and a bunch of stuff about why I was brilliant and why my proposed supervisors and institution were brilliant and, for those shortlisted, an interview with half a dozen nationally recognised academics. After all this they gave me the grant and I had massive imposter syndrome for at least the first year because I just knew they'd made a mistake and got the wrong person or something!

Oh, I did forget to say that I was fully (salary, not stipend) funded because I got a doctoral fellowship, which made the whole thing possible, and I didn't have to think about other work during my PhD. Having been awarded one fellowship has also helped me be competitive afterwards (but industry funding may well give similar advantages in your field)

I started my PhD at 44, finished at 48 (last year). It was both the hardest and the best thing I have done and I am so glad I did it. Mattfabb has said that older students can struggle because they don't like being in a subordinate position, and it is true that you do have to be able to take advice and criticism (perhaps from people younger than you) but being older brings it's own advantages. The younger students I was with were more likely to be scared of their supervisors, more likely to internalise criticism ('it's not my work - it's me they hate') and more likely to make catastrophes out of mistakes and set-backs.

I'm now an 'early career researcher' and it's great.

I can only agree with everyone else who has said that 2 weeks is nothing to worry about. This is a very busy time of year (in my department teaching has just started, MSc assignments need marking, departmental strategies are being planned etc), or perhaps this paper is quite niche?

I submitted my last paper to a reasonably good journal in my field (not elite but OK) in January, it showed 'awaiting reviewer assignment' for 3 months, so I nagged them - and got a response that they had one review and were looking for another review (apparently they'd asked 8 people - which didn't seem very many to me), in June I nagged them again (they'd asked another 4 people), in July I got comments back from one reviewer and the editor. I responded and they accepted the paper in August and it was published in September - with minimal changes. I freely admit it isn't a very exciting paper, but it's necessary and I think the journal should have been more timely.

I am not sure why you need any input from your supervisor for very minor corrections. You've passed, it's your thesis and you defended it successfully (well done btw), just do the corrections and send them to your internal. I did that last year, not because I thought my supervisors would deliberately be slow and try and hold my graduation back, but because I knew I could make the necessary corrections without advice and they would prefer I sorted it out for myself.

It may be that your institution is different and supervisors have to sign off corrections as well, in which case ignore me - just call him, be polite and ask him for a date when he will respond. Check that when he does respond you can use his comments and can submit the corrections without asking him to give further feedback.

You will appear on his CV / grant applications as a successful PhD student, so he is not going to prevent you from graduating in the long term.

I know two women (both older than you) who have been on maternity leave mid PhD. It's not easy juggling a child and PhD but they're managing, one of them will submit next week and is also pregnant with her second. She has just started a new job in her department and had to tell them she was pregnant before even taking up the post. She will go on maternity leave in the summer.

If you are in Europe there are all sorts of laws against discrimination due to pregnancy, they aren't perfect but if you do decide to wait, don't feel you have to be unemployed before you can start trying for a baby. You really are allowed to talk about wanting a child - even with male supervisors (does he have children? Does he know people with children?) - but if that feels impossible your institution may have specific mentoring support for female academics and research postgrads so seek it out, yours is a common concern and you ought to be able to find people who can advise and support you (maybe even helping you disucss this with your supervisor). If your institution has an Athena Swan award (extended to cover social sciences and humanities last year) they will have to have this kind of thing in place.

Good luck.

I don't know if it is possible these days to have an academic career in your field without a PhD. I have a friend who was a Professor of economics at a Russel group university who was awarded his PhD two years ago, a year after he retired at the age of about 70 but I can't see how that has any bearing on someone trying to get into academia in the 21st century. I think advice to seek a research assistant role is sound because it gets you experience working in an academic department and you will be better placed to see if there are opportunities. Also, if you haven't, write up your MSc thesis as a paper and try to get it published - you may find publicising your work tedious but you will get nowhere in academia without embracing the need to do so.

I also suggest that you contact the Professors and other researchers you know of who don't have PhDs and ask them for advice, rather than asking people who have already decided that a PhD is vital.

It means one reviewer hated it and the others, presumably, thought it was at least OK. What comments did the editor make? What do you think? Do you think the person who hated it made some reasonable points that you could use to improve your paper or do you think they were an idiot who didn't read it properly and you can refute pretty much everything they said with better explanations?

Hey, Dr TreeofLife, well done. Passing with trivial minor corrections is great. It is very disappointing that your examiners were unpleasant and were grudging about it but please try not to let that get in the way of your achievement. Maybe they disagreed with what you wrote / found / did because it challenges a pet theory, maybe they were just miserable so-and-sos, but in the end your thesis and defence were good enough to survive a hostile examination and come out of the other end with few changes and that's brilliant.

Ok, my background is pretty much entirely clinical research. I didn't do a clinical trial for my PhD (graduated this summer -yay!) but I used clinical populations. I would ask are you doing this in the UK and if so, do your supervisors or people on the team have experience of clinical research (better yet, also does some clinical work within the NHS)? If you are in the UK and no one in the team has done clinical research before and no one has good clinical links I STRONGLY advise you to not to attempt a clinical trial for your PhD.

If you are part of a team/department/unit with a good clinical research background or you have a clinical background yourself (in which case get as much help as you possibly can from your local NHS R&D department) then you'll probably be OK giving it a go.

To answer your original question, a control group would be ethical because, as far as I am aware, there are have only been short term trials done with beetroot juice/capsules with blood pressure as an outcome so there isn't yet any compelling evidence that giving people beetroot juice is beneficial in the longer term. You have to do an RCT to demonstrate this.

I'd suggest that over the next month you take a look at the Good Clinical Practice training website and familiarise yourself with what the NIHR can offer (if you aren't NIHR funded you will need to find out what you have to do to get NIHR Portfolio status for your study - everything is so much easier if you have this, also I would think you will want to investigate your local clinical trials unit at some point in your first few months - although their involvement is likely to be expensive). Also frighten yourself by looking at the NHS ethics process and IRAS.

Best of luck.

It sounds like you have reached about the same stage with your work as I had 9 months ago. I submitted shortly before Christmas so don't quit over a presentation. I think Pjlu's advice is good but also consider seeing if your University offers presentation skills training and then take other, safe opportunities to practice presenting.

Being bullied is incredibly difficult and damaging but try and remember that most of the rest of the audience will be supportive of you as the speaker (partly it's fellow feeling - lots of people find presenting tough). If it feels like someone is trying to publicly undermine you then others will notice and it won't reflect badly on you. If you are asked difficult questions that you really can't answer then just say so. There are some really good phrases for this: "That's a very interesting question, I'm afraid I don't have the answer right now" , "That is an important point and you are right, I haven't properly addressed it and will now give it some thought" , "That's something I haven't had time to look at in detail but these are some of my thoughts...." That kind of thing. You don't have to have answers for everything and presentations can be helpful to clarify your thinking / see where there are gaps in your work. Also as there are others who can see the behaviour, ask them in advance to notice if you are struggling and to be prepared to help if a line of questioning becomes aggressive / undermining.

it may be helpful to book a single councilling session before the presentation to discuss what is the worse thing that can happen with a safe person. I am assuming you can't fail your PhD if your presentation is not very good (or even if you do what someone I know did which was to completely freeze, be unable to speak and then just left - this person now has a very successful career that involves presenting) but you will certainly fail if you quit over it!

Hi Marusa,

I haven't done your survey because it tells me nothing about who you are, where you are based, what the purpose of the reasearch is, what the research will be used for and gives no guaruntee of confidentiality.

if your research interests are in Clinical Psychology then do think about (& discuss) the Clinical route. The advantages of Clinical first is that it will give you a break from academia (which is a world of its own), contact with other health professionals and service users and you can make sure your research is relevant to the people you want to reach. It also gives you a profession and access to the NIHR Clinical Academic Training scheme (amongst others). I suspect too, that if you were to do a PhD first and then try to do Clinical you'd risk losing touch with the academic side afterwards and people may regard you more as a failed academic who is trying to get into clinical work as a fall-back. If you already have a clinical qualification and are moving into research then you're working towards becoming a clinical academic and that sounds so much better!

Just ignore the little voice in your head that tells you you aren't clever enough or don't know enough. That's normal and you just have to work hard and pretend you are good enough and you will be as good as anyone else. PhD funding, clinical training posts, Fellowships are all competitive but someone has to get them so why not you?

Hi,

I feel for you too but, as Annie wrote, the MPhil could be used as a stepping stone. I don't know what field you're in but you may very well be able to build a research career out of it. I don't know what the route might be but maybe go and talk to your careers service (and, if you haven't done so already, student counselling- you've had a really tough time, you could probably use some support). Is there anyone from the staff who has been supportive who may be able to help / mentor? Anyone from a different institution? Also take a look at some research assistant/associate jobs to see where an MPhil could take you at the moment.

Annie is right, you are not defined by committees and supervisors, and an MPhil is still a higher degree.

Good luck.

Hi,

To be honest I think that entirely depends on your supervisors and your department. I went part time due to family circumstances after 18 months and have had exactly the same amount of supervision, if not more. The best advice I can give is to discuss the implications with your supervisor(s) and for you both to agree on expectations, timescale etc.