Help! My supervisor, who I get on really well with, has told me in confidence that he's going to moving to another institute later in the year. He seems pretty confident he can take me with him but I'm a bit sceptical, although he's great academically he's seemed a little less than totally clued up on the practicle aspects before. It'd be great if he could - the place he's going to has much better facilities for what I'm doing, and is much closer to where my family lives. But surely my university wouldn't be happy to lose a PhD student, and I've never heard of a mechanism to transfer one over. I'm a little concerned that I'll end up at the same university, with a new supervisor who doesn't have as much expertise as my current one (it's a fairly small field) and with whom I may not have such a good relationship.

Help!

One of our Profs brought all his PhD students with him when he started at my uni a few years ago, so they are now registered with us instead of their original uni. We had a similar situation when another prof left us to go to different uni, but his students remained registered with us; he is still supervising them but they have been given an additional supervisor based at our uni. I've no idea what the various university administrative procedures are in these situations, but it doesn't seem unusual. If your supervisor is keen to take you with him and that would suit you too, can you ask him to find out the details of how it would work?

He hasn't told the university yet, so I don't think he knows for sure. But it's encouraging that it's been done

My supervisor brought 3 PhD students over when he moved to my uni (before I was doing PhD). They were given all the facilties e.g. office etc in our uni, but were also allowed to continue to use resources at the old uni including online resources and email - seemed to work quite well.