It's a bit of a long shot but I am very curious with this. I am hoping to study PhD however not sure if I would like to do it full or part time. What kind of attendance was required when you studied it? Was it so you had to be in university every day, or would only need to come in for few hours each week for a lecture and do rest of the work at home? Could you let me know, also what field and if it was full or part time? I don't know anyone else to ask since I don't know anyone who has PhD.

I am in the UK doing a full time engineering degree and I turn up every day 9-5 because I have trouble focusing at home. But I barely see my supervisor once a week and she doesn't mind where or when I work or even how much I work. As long as there are some results and progress, no one cares how much I turn up. Hope that helps.

Thank you rewt, that helps a lot. So do you ever have any lectures at all or is it more about just seeing your supervisor?

Like rewt, I prefer to work on campus, with a dedicated workspace and office hours.
Lectures would be in the first two years, but it probably depends on the program and what type of training you need for your methods and data collection. I'm using a method that I'm already comfortable with for a social science thesis (full time), so I only needed one class that met once a week, and got it done in the first semester. Any additional classes are optional. However, others are taking 1 or 2 classes every semester to familarise themselves with theories and methods. Supervisor meetings are only once a month, and can be done on Skype.

In the UK we dont have any lectures or coursework as part of our PhD so we have less "supervised" work (though we are usually expected to have a masters before starting which kinda compensates). So as long as I am showing results and work I keep my supervisor and Uni happy. Though I do meet or call my supervisor weekly to catch up on what I am doing/ what I should be doing.

That is the thing with a PhD in the UK at least, you are usually measured by results, not by the number of hours in the office. In theory, I could only come in for labs and do the rest of my work in the middle of the night at home, so I am not physically bound to a desk.

Virshininke, you are considering full-time or part-time based on workloads? Generally, I would say if you can get funding go full time as there is less time management hassle as you only have to manage one thing. Or do you have other priorities to consider? Also what field are considering as certain areas require more/less time in uni?

I am in UK too. I have done Masters in Computing last year, so seeing if I could do PhD in a same computer science/IT field. I would probably pay for my PhD, rather than get funding and would still like to keep the job I have at the moment, howerer it is full time, but with some free time if its not too busy, where possibly I could work on other things such as PhD, as that's what I have done with my masters.

If you're planning on working alongside the PhD, especially full-time (or near enough), then it would definitely be sensible to sign up part-time. Even though the majority of a PhD is independent study that you can do where and when you like, it's still a huge undertaking with regular deadlines and milestones that have to be hit. Part-time would give you some much-needed flexibility on this.

That said, it's usually fairly easy to change your funding status from full to part time or vice versa once you're enrolled, especially if you're self-funding. So you can always try out one way then switch if it's not working out for you.