Just wondering, do you forget completely about your PhD during the summer vacation or do you keep working? I have the opportunity to visit some archives which I need for my research during the summer but that would involve working almost without breaks from April to December! Is that sane?

WTF? You have the Summer off?

I get 10 days off for Easter as the uni buildings are closed, but other than bank holidays the rest of the time I should be in uni. I'm taking a holiday in September but otherwise working straight through, how would you get enough done otherwise?

If you took the whole summer vacation off then your supervisor would probably make sure that you don't have a PhD project to come back to.

I get 27 days a year plus bank holidays. Is that good?

Holiday? I think you must be joking. I've been told that there is no holiday for PhD students, even if "officially" you are entitled to have a certain number of days off. The expectation from my supervisor is to work through, day and night plus weekends. He said that will prepare me for a life as an academic. Don't think that's complementary with my definition of life. Dear workaholics- please remember: PhD or not, publications or not, every human being on this planet has only ONE life, no matter what your supervisor tells you

Well - my supervisors are just the contrary - they are worried I have a breakdown if I don't take rests.

Maybe it's different in the humanities...

Not sure even humanities students get to relax for 6 weeks...do they? If do, I certainly chose the wrong field I think I averaged about 10 days leave a year as a PhD student (and most of those were half days for hair cuts and the like!). As other have said, you might be entitled to 25 plus days but a lot of people don't use it all. That said, you do only get one life so if you can somehow get the summer off (and you're not worried by deadlines), go for it!

could u get ur summer holidays and deliver the work you have to deliver to keep ur supervisor happy? if you can then u could get the holidays u want. if not, please forget it

Otto - i totally agree. we all only have one life. last thing i want to be thinking when am 90 is that i let life pass me by spending my entire time in the lib. Speaking of holidays, there is nothing like labs to report to for us guys in the humanities, leave alone worries about when to take holidays. we take them when we want for how long we like, as long as you maintain regular contact with your supervisor. my friend took April to Sept to work from home, in a totally different country and before that she had been away for December holidays and her sup was fine with that, as long as she handed in work regularly via email. my sup sometime last year told me i could do that, only reason i didn chose to work from home is the lack of a decent lib where i can find all the material i need. My science flatmates tho, get around 10 days off a year, which to me is sic.

oh, summer or not, mine is 5 a day. that works for me. i often treat myself to weekends away to keep my sanity and also work part time to get a differeng flavour of everyday stuff.

my opinion - you'd be crazy to take all summer off. for one, you'd lag behind in your work and you'd be stressed trying to remember the stuff and catching up. i like to think of my research as a masters thesis. i wouldn take the whole of summer off doing my masters coz i would be expected to hand in work in Sept. maybe two weeks, a month max. no more.

I plan to drag the boyfriend around Sweden for a bit...show him where we'll raise the barnen (lol)

But I'll be carrying on with my thesis - tis expected of us!

officially i have about 43 holidays this year + the days i didnt take last year (don't ask me why - strange dutch laws). anyway, i doubt that i can take more than 20, otherwise i would feel far too guilty. besides, the pay is not great, so going to some cool place for 6 weeks is out of the question anyway.

but i will just take days of in summer and sit by the pool and work - that is as far as it goes. maybe someone else has some suggestions how to lighten work up during the summer? do you go camping with your literature review or something? i am still looking for something nice to do that combines work and relaxation :)

I'm probably going to have three-four weeks off as I'm getting married (and going on honeymoon yay can't wait).

I'm working really hard at the moment to conpensate for the big chunk of time off.

H, it's going to be the biggest (and the first if I'm not wrong) wedding of PostgradForum. We all are looking forward to it