Just the fact of being able to write a chapter seems to me a great deed now! Well done!

What strikes me is that you seem to regret that you left your PhD mainly because now you don't have "contacts"! In other words as if you saw you PhD as a way to make "contacts" rather than to gain certain skills, increase your knowledge of your topic etc. The importance of networking while doing your PhD (or in general) will never be emphasized too much, but honestly, I think there are better and simplest ways of making contacts than struggling for 3 years trying to produce research.

LOL "Señorita" is used for unmarried (so usually younger) ladies whereas "señora" is used for married (so usually older) women. In situations where you don't know if a lady is married or not, the pattern is "señorita" for young ladies, "señora" for (ehem) older ones. So no it doesn't sound too well does it.

Sure a paradigm shift is needed... but I think that some countries like the UK seem readier to accept it than others like Spain or Italy where a woman in her thirties is often seen as an old lady.

Well I might be wrong but I think this whole idea of considering yourself old when you're in your 30s (or even mid/late-20s) is very common in Southern Europa cultures (I'm from Spain myself). At 30 you're generally considered too old to start a new job or switch to a different area, let alone start a bachelors or a PhD! And it's even worse for women. Well just an observation, don't know if it's too scientific.

I read during my first 4 months, my situation was pretty much like yours (always finding more and more literature to be read...) and last week I had a meeting with my supervisor and told him about my concerns (material growing bigger and bigger and more and more difficult to organize) and he suggested me to set deadlines for this term, including exactly what I would like to read but also what I would like to write. I have done it and I think it will help me working in a more focused way but I don't know how difficult will it be to stick to it because I am a bit chaotic as a researcher and every time I read a paper I find at least 3 new directions to explore!

That sounds well - they didn't give the chance to submit proposals for posters but I don't think posters are very common in my area. When I browse for conferences I could contribute to, I have never seen a "call for posters" - only "call for papers".

They will announce the final decision mid-March and the conference is end-June so I hope to keep you updated!

I submitted last week a proposal to give a paper in a conference and was wondering how easy it is to get accepted: do conference organizers do a very strict selection (they only accept, say, 1 in 8 or 10 papers) or would they accept everything as long as it is methodologically adequate and relevant to the conference? I guess it depends on the subject and on the conference - this doesn't seem to be an international or "big" conference, rather limited to the UK; it has a topic but they are looking for a particular "approach" rather than for a specific area/period within my discipline (history of msic), so I guess quite a lot of people would be able to submit proposals as the topic is not terribly obscure. Any thoughts?

Don't know much about this area, but the logical thing to do would be (rather than browsing university things) look at journal articles in this field, check who wrote them and then find out(shouldn't be a problem using Google) where are the authors based.

@Bobby: sure I was meaning Astronomy I always get them confused... perhaps I shouldn't be doing a PhD after all.

I'm afraid it makes a big difference. For example you are excluded of the Research Councils' scholarships (the ESRC for International Relations I guess). Tuition fees for non-EU citizens tend to be substantially higher. A masters it's about 3,000 £ - 4,000 £ for UK/EU students but for international ones it can be the double of that or more.

I'm flying to Berlin in 6 days as well ... but it's for a conference so I guess my supervisor shouldn't be bothered!

A further point would be that in some fields it is more difficult to publish than in others. I have read recently that in the Social Sciences 70% of the articles sent for publications are rejected, whereas that happens only to 15% of the articles in Astrology (don't know if that's exact).

It depends very much on the subject. For example, I could actually live 100 miles away from my university and go there only every 3-4 weeks for supervision meetings, provided that I had access to the archives I need to research and possibly an Athens password to browse journals. If you are in a humanities or social sciences subject, this could be a solution, altought maybe you should agree first with your university how many times a month would you be required to travel, etc. In lab-based subjects I suppose it's much more difficult.

Yes I reference the actual paper as well (which can be done easily by exporting the reference from JSTOR directly to EndNote, RefWorks and other referencing softwares).