Hi,
Starting a PhD this month, so I am looking forward to getting to know the other forum members over the next four years.

The best advice I can offer is this:

Use the forum when you are happy as well as when you are feeling low. It's easy to express your feelings when you are down, but I've found it important to come on the forum and look at positive posts, especially when I'm feeling good about things. The same goes for a lot of things in life, actually; don't let the negative outweigh the positive simply as a factor of attention paid to those things.

Hey well done on taking the plunge, im spending this year planning. I start a part time masters and PhD next year. This forum has been excellent and cant thank people enough for their posts. It helped so much for me to get to the stage I am at with a supervisor organised and applying for funding.

What is your subject? Have you got all your goodies pens, folders, papers?!!! Waterstones is giving out free year planners, very colourful ones! at the moment might help you with planning!!

I'm going into bio-informatics.

Hello!

Welcome, there are a few people starting PhDs this year. I to will be on here as a PhD student for the next 4 years :)

Hello all,

I've been reading the forum for a good 3 - 4 years ever since I was an undergraduate, and am now due to start my PhD at the end of this month, having just finished my MA in Modern History, and am excited to get involved a bit more and, well, to post my own experiences.

As someone who has been slightly put-off by what can often be the sheer negativeness of many posters, I understand that doing a PhD can produce such a stance and this place seems to double up as agony aunt and forum! I hope to bring a bit of optimism to the forum as I'm incredibly excited to begin (famous last words?).

Oh, and I'll be doing a PhD in history. Nice to meet you all!

Hi everyone!

I've also been reading this forum off and on since graduating from my MSc in 2006 and am now starting a PhD in Plant Pathology this month. Very excited!

Good to meet you all.

:-)

Hi to all the other newbies :-)

I've posted in a different thread to say hello, but saw this and thought i'd say hello here as well. Feeling both excited and nervous as i begin my Phd in a couple of weeks, still sounds odd to say that! I'm going to be at UClan in the Pharmacy and Biomedical School, and will be researching something related to cancer/brain tumors.

Good luck to everyone else starting as we begin this new adventure together, looking forward to hearing how we all get on over the next few years through the ups and the downs.:-)

Congratulations for taking the PhD programme just like me .My research area is in Power System Engineering .We will be together for the coming 4 years............Good luck everybody .