Just thought I would ask how many of you are doing collaborative phds, i.e. with organisations. How are you finding the pressures of academic work and quasi consultancy!?

I am: most of the time it's fine, but sometimes I get a box with 2000 samples in that "need" analysing by yesterday, and then you have to drop everything and do it. I also have to present progress to a board every month.

The major difficulty for me is when instruments are not working: if I was just doing a normal PhD, I would be the only one affected - but as it is, I get angry emails from businessmen asking why I am not doing the work I'm being paid to do. Explaining that your uni is slow to fix things does not go down well

hmm I have similar problems, I am often asked to do work that is nothing to do with my PhD which makes me slightly annoyed and also get people at uni moaning that I am never there and people in the organisation saying the same becasue I always seem to be in the wrong location at the wrong time!

Pain, isn't it? On the one hand I wouldn't be able to do the PhD without the funding, but on the other hand, they do often expect a lot for it!

I feel quite jealous of the "normal" students who only have themselves to answer to. Then again, it keeps you on yout toes.

hmm, yeah I'm hoping it will be good for jobs after its all finished, in that I haven't just worked in a university all my life - and true, I couldn't do it without the funding! Also, no scraping around for data as they provide it all.

Yes, that's a point: my thesis will be a mixture of stuff I was required to do, and stuff I thought of myself. There is a lot of overlap.