Anyone else lulled into "what a good idea it would be" to do a PhD whilst working full time? I did. If I had my time again I would run so far off to outta mongolia than make the same decision! I wondered if there was anyone else out there who was feeling desperately unhappy.

am doing my phd fulltime and my first year was spend on teaching and part-time jobs and evenings and weekends on my work. i've recently stopped working to catch up with my work. i didn't manage to transfer at the end of my first year - supervisor problems coupled with being too busy juggling jobs to concentrate and develop any leads i had. am now really enjoying the last 2 months, having quit working til September and its amazing how my work has developed. am looking forward to submitting my upgrading report this month and hopefully everything will work out. are you self-funded? if you are, have you considered probably taking out a loan to cover your period of study so you can concentrate on your work now and pay it off later. i know no one likes to take a loan, but working fulltime and a phd are not things that go together. alternatively change to part-time, although you risk getting bored - 5 years is a long time to be thinking of the answer to one question?

Convincing someone that they can work and do a PhD is quite a good scam for some research teams. I know of someone that agreed to work fulltime (to fund themselves, some adminy job) and do their PhD research part time. Initially she thought that she could spend 5 years doing it, and she worked her arse off, collecting data and running experiments etc, but everytime she approached her supervisor she would be encouraged to write up experiments as individual papers (that she would end up being second or third author on naturally).

Cont'd

The research team win out, as they get an unpaid powerless researcher (who actually has to pay for the privilige of working for them in fees), who is committed for a long period of time, doing work that they take the credit for. She started her PhD in 1998 and is still at the "literature review" stage. She is working for the same temping/admin agency now and she tells me that this may be the first year she has saved up enough money to "go on holiday overseas- like to Spain".

The funny thing is though she is the most rabidly optimistic pro-academic person. If you ask her "how is it going" she will say "Oh about a year left to go", which she has been saying since the early 2000s.

woah, didn't know unis allow someone to stay on a course that long - at my uni its four years max or six year part-time. if you still haven't finished, they fail you. i like her optimism tho and ability to still be alive 9 years in. I suppose that is because she's working as well, so she doesn't feel the urgency to finish.

I ditched my full-time job and took a crappy PT admin job because I'd seen too many people fail/go crazy trying to study and work FT

I'm studying and working full time, but its an English PhD rather than lab-based. I find the workload ok because my job is easy, but its been an issue to not be seen as handicapped by my supervisor. I do hope to be able to reduce the day-job duties as time goes on, but initially it helps you appreciate your chance and time to study and also is an encouragement when study seems a bit futile (you're pretty much self-sufficient anyway).

Thanks guys so much for your messages, its nice to know that I am not the only idiot out there. Its going much better now guys, think I might get there!