Hi All

I enrol on Thursday for my three years of no life and no money...all a little daunting to say the least! At what stage should you have your research questions/hypotheses/title of your study formulated and ready to go?

Best wishes

Hannah

Good luck!!! Lol, the million dollar question - if you get answers I'd be interested to know - I'm a year in now, still dont have a fixed title, the main focus changed about 4 months in, my research questions are being reformulated (AGAIN) atm, so I wouldn't worry too much ;-) As you get going you find that it takes on a life of its own - of course you must control it - but the research I'm doing now bears little resemblance to what I had planned a year ago ;-) Different geographical areas, different angle, different results so far, different everything apart from the main underlying sources and the overall question. I'm sure I should be more organised but as I started to read and started to work new themes came to light, it grew and became (I hope) much much better and more interesting

I had a clear proposal and sub-questions before starting, but they've evolved constantly throughout the PhD, including up to and beyond producing the full draft of my thesis. Partly this is due to supervisors saying 'so what' i.e. what is the point of what I've done, rather than it being an open-ended exploration. But it's also as they try to help me narrow down what exactly I've found out.

It might vary by discipline though, as well as by individual supervisor. When I was a science PhD student over a decade ago my research goals were much clearer from the onset. Now that I'm a humanities PhD student (almost finished), working on my own topic, it's much more open-ended and prone to constant redefinition.