I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this (rather long and tedious) situation. I am a medic doing a PhD with full external funding from a research council fellowship. When I started my research in January, I thought that registering for a PhD would be just a formality. Fatal mistake… I sent off all the forms within the first week. However seven months on, the archaic bureaucracy at this supposedly prestigious institution has meant that I'm still not officially registered for a PhD! So far steps in this process include:

1) Graduate admissions office receives forms and sends them to wrong departmental graduate tutor
2) Correct tutor receives forms but does nothing with them for two months until chased (by me). Unfortunately he is part-time and based at a different site.
3) Aforementioned graduate tutor then say he will ‘email my primary supervisor to find out how to take this forward’
4) Discover that (very good) primary supervisor is not registered with university to act as a primary supervisor: he was ineligible until he handed in his own MD and then filled in a form. He was in the process of doing it. This takes around one month
5) Six weeks later, I chase up the graduate tutor again. This time he informs me that it might be a problem to have a second supervisor at a different institution (despite lots of other PhD students being in this position and the fact that he had known about this since day 1)
6) Spend several hours calling around various university admin offices to discover the procedure for dealing with this, which I relay to graduate tutor
7) Graduate tutor then emails various managers and, after some wrangling over a fee transfer to institution number two (apparently usual procedure but which he didn’t want to follow) we finally agree to register 2nd supervisor as an external supervisor at this university without a fee transfer
8) Takes several weeks to register 2nd supervisor
9) Graduate tutor then emails to say he has just found out that second supervisor needs an honorary contract and to attend a 90 minute PhD supervisor training course (despite being an experienced professor and having attended several supervisory courses at his own institution)
10) Six months in, graduate tutor suggests putting down a nominal second supervisor to allow me to register (then swap around supervisors later). Usually it is only possible to backdate a registration by 3 months
11) Person dealing with forms at admissions office has been on holiday/ on maternity leave/ dead for a few weeks. Just back today and sends me an email asking for reasons for the delay...

What would others do now (also bearing in mind research is not going terribly well)? I am torn between:

a) Deep breath, polite email from me and supervisor explaining situation
b) Withdraw application and register at 2nd supervisor's institution
c) Official complaint
d) Forget PhD, quit medicine and research and go on holiday

Any thoughts?

Hi,

I think there are two issues here. One is whether the conference organisers will mind if you present something a bit different to the abstract submitted, and I think the answer is no. Often you have to submit abstracts months before the conference and results might not be available at the time. In the past I have submitted some very vague abstracts and no one seems to mind if the final presentation is a little different. The second issue though is what your supervisor will think if you stand up there and present something totally different to what he is expecting. This is trickier - even if you go ahead and write the presentation as you want, you should run it past him beforehand.

Good luck!