I have a question. Do any of your supervisors use your funding to attend conferences? And also do any of you have to demonstrate and not get paid for it? I just have a question, since I moved to a different country for my PhD and things seems to be different and want to know if this is normal. Thank you.

Any views on this?

Using your funding for their conferences? I may be mistaken, but I thought that your 'free' funding was part of the tuition costs. Of course, that is assuming you are paying and this is not funding for the project that you and your super are working on, which also happens to include your PhD.

Hello. It is funding for the project. To buy consumables and for me to attend conferences. It is not just my supervisors who are using it to attend conferences, but also funding from my project is going to other students in the lab who do not have much funding for their project, and if they want to buy chemicals or attend conferences etc (what they are working on is unrelated to my project) they are told take from Xs fund. Her project comes with funding. I am just worried that there will not be enough left for my project at the end, and wanted to see if this is normal.

It'sd not the norm where I am, but I am bot lab based. IN my first year some chemicals were bought on my grant, they were useful for the centre in general and not specifically for my project, and my other supervisor was not happy about it though eventually agreed. There was some talk about a post doc using some of my research money for a conference and my other supervisor was very very against this and it did not happen.