======= Date Modified 15 Sep 2012 14:24:53 =======
Hi all,
I am hoping for some words of advice. I left college – after studying very little – in 1998 and worked fulltime in children’s social care until 2008 when I decided to complete a degree in social work. My main motivation for doing this was to increase my future employment opportunities. I remained employed on a part time basis - I couldn’t afford not to.  I did well and in 2011 I graduated with first class honours and received a scholarship. I can enrol upon any course of study – including a PHD - and my tuition fees will be paid for. I need to have enrolled upon a course within a three year period following graduation – this takes me to July 2014. Luckily for me I managed to secure a post as a social worker immediately after I graduated and that brings me up to where I am today. 
I would like to complete my PHD and I don’t want to lose the opportunity of funding. I enjoyed studying and my motivation for doing this is for a personal sense of fulfilment and to increase my career prospects. I worry that if I enrolled upon a master’s course that this wouldn’t make me stand out to future employers and that I would be wasting an opportunity. I don’t see myself working as a social worker in the long-term. I have just completed over a year in the job and it is utterly mind training. I want to be able to continue to stretch myself and not to end up burnt out like some of my colleagues. Potentially I would like to work within academia, social policy and or training/consultancy.      
My main problems are the following:
1)     I don’t know if I am truly capable. This might sound silly but I genuinely don’t. I did well in my degree but I’m sure that this would be much harder. Are there people out there who have gone from degree straight to PHD? 
2)     I am single and a mature student. Whatever happens I would need to continue to work while I studied to pay the mortgage etc... Is this feasible? What are the - if there are any - bursary opportunities?  

Hi,

I'm a social scientist and it is increasingly unusual to go straight from BA to PhD in the social sciences, because the main funder (ESRC) prefers / insists all funded students complete a research methods Masters first - they call this type of funding a 1+3 award. If your course, like most, had only a relatively basic research methods course it might be worth seeing whether your scholarship would cover this. I mention this not because I think you're not capable of doing a PhD, but because increasingly if you haven't got a good range of research methods training, it's hard to get jobs particularly in social policy, as a lot of the research studies there are quite methods-driven these days. For consultancy, you'll probably also need quantitative methods training to a reasonably high level. Your funding situation is a bit complex as you have the tuition scholarship which I'm guessing ties you to one university? You'd need to ask them whether they offer anything. Also however tempting, make sure they actually have an academic who can supervise whatever topic you want to study. If not, I'd suggest thinking about using the scholarship to do an ESRC recognised research methods MA (which if you're not dead set on academia might be enough to get you into the other roles you mention) and then applying for +3 funding (tuition and maintenance) from an ESRC doctoral training centre (DTC). You can find information on the ESRC recognised courses and DTCs on their website (look under postgraduate training) - www.esrc.ac.uk . There are also some PhD posts tied to specific research projects but compared with the sciences, these are relatively rare. They are usually advertised on jobs.ac.uk .