Aloha guys :-)
Very new to this site and to the idea of completing a PhD... Hoping to apply for a biochemistry/microbiology PhD at a university in Scotland and looking for some general info on studying for a PhD!
1) Do you also study for other modules whilst completing your research?
2) Do you only study during academic trimesters (i.e. off for xmas/new year or summer)?
I apologise if there was previously a thread regarding this (did look through a few pages) but I am a mother of two with a husband who travels frequently for business so having to take in all the practicalities before submitting my application.

Thanks in advance :-)

Hi, I doing a biomedical PhD in the UK and I didn't study for any modules during my PhD. I just did research. You study all year round, i.e. you don't get the long summer holidays that you used to get as an undergrad! My uni was closed over Xmas/New year and easter though, so I took most of those days off ;-) (apart from having to look after cell cultures...). You also tend to get a certain number of days of holiday per year, at my uni it was 25 days.

Aloha Kahuna! Just as a further point about this, it's now actually becoming common at some universities and for some funding bodies to offer slightly longer PhDs where you have to study modules as part of your course. The year I started, I just did a standard 3 year PhD with an extra year for writing up. The following year (at least in my department) all the PhDs were either 3.5 or 4 years with either 3 or 6 taught modules respectively which had to be taken and passed. Talking to some other PhD students at my university, other departments were rolling out the same thing.

I would ask about this when you start applying as procedures vary in different universities.

Mine is going to be a MRes+PhD where you take some taught courses in the first year (at least for the first 3 months). This is a fairly common structure, but there are still plenty of traditional PhDs where you focus on your research for 3 or 4 years with no formal taught aspect. I've known some people sit in on a few undergraduate classes during their PhD if they need to gain knowledge in a particular subject.

You're definitely not limited to term/semester times, a full-time PhD is more like a full-time job, though depending on your subect/supervisor you might have a fair amount of flexibility about the days/hours you work, compared to most jobs. If you're doing it part-time, that's a different matter, I guess you have to discuss and negotiate with work/manager and university/supervisor to work out how much time you're going to commit to each thing.

Hello

There's been a few threads like this - do a search on 'holidays' and you should bring up some results. Yes, course work depends on the discipline you're in - in mine, students are required to do a couple of courses in their first year, and still be expected to finish in 3 years. We're also given four weeks leave, but I've never taken more than a week or so off, a couple of times a year if I'm lucky, during my PhD. You're also expected to put at least the same amount of hours as a full-time job, if you're a full-time student, although I also tend to do much more than this. Other people do less then me though - it also depends on how many conference papers, journal articles etc you want to write.

Hi guys :-)

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. I have a meeting with one of the project supervisors this afternoon to discuss my many questions that I have! It does seem from all your feedback it is very dependant on the institution that you study with so I'll go find my specifics...

Thanks again
;-)