What research group would you be part of ? (it is not always obvious)
What equipment do they have/lab space?
Whatever you are interested in and they like talking about.
Also talking with their current grad students gives you the real story about how good they are at actually supervising

you are going on a weekend?

Teaching support can pay quite well in the UK. I do 6hours a week during term time and get just over £70 a week after tax. It isn't much but it is realtively easy work.

Also remember that the 14,500 is tax-free.

I did something similar for my masters' dissertation. Where I optimised a unit operation in a manufacturing plant during a placement year (meant I did masters dissertation before I had even started). I will give you some advice from my work and hopefully, some of it might be relevance.

You need to decide your boundary conditions - where does it start, where does it end, what can you vary, what external conditions are fixed? If you look at too many variables it can very complicated fast, so you want to focus only on the most important aspects. If you get lots of results you can look at more variables and extreme conditions but set it at a manageable level to start with. Talk about processes upstream and downstream and how they affect the project but just assume they are fixed and produce/require fixed conditions. It makes it so much easier if you can initially say that the previous process is always working.

Define your conditions. For my project, I decided that profit was the absolute indicator of performance and everything else was constraints. Ie my constraints were; keep waste below 25%, not to increase manpower required, produce consistent products. So if all the constraints were met I was only looking at one value for comparison.

Methodology! This varies between processes but I bet there isn't much literature on your process. So create your own literature and vary everything from there. I knew 3 settings always worked, I had those settings incredibly well documented with all the outputs and costs recorded for nearly all external conditions. Therefore whatever happened or whatever method I used, I had something I could compare to, meaning most of my data was useful.

Finally, talk with the operators/technicians/users. They usually have a very different understanding of the process than office staff that can be invaluable.

Hope this helps and good luck,
rewt

As Eng77 said, if the PI wants you, they usually bend the rules to make it possible. To be honest, grades are not a perfect way to predict your ability to do research and most people know that. The reason they use it is that for most Ph.D. students, grades are the only bit of life experience they have.

Other ways to possibly get around it. Claim "extenuating circumstances" for your undergrad which didn't affect your masters. Claim you are a mature student and say that your experience compensates (mature students usually have different entrance criteria). Be a part-time PhD student while keeping the job while using the data from the job to submit a thesis.

Just talk to your PI about your worries. He is the most informed person on this subject and will help you get past the bureaucracy or will point you in the right direction.

kikothedog; that supervisor sounds fun! And is that legal?

completed and my answers were mildly disturbing

This is definitely thread necromancy if I ever seen it.

I am sorry to hear about your predicament Cat!

As Eng77 said, can you at least publish that useless data? Write it up in some way and get is published in a low tier journal. If you get it peer-reviewed and published it will be easier to talk about the work in your thesis, and then the year isn't wasted.

Also about the lab space and lack of training. I feel the same problems with no-one my area (including the technicians) and also having a lab-shy supervisor. I fortunately, got myself into a local young researchers conference which helped me figure out what I should be doing experimentally. Plus I followed that up with a short lab visit to one of the researchers I met at the conference. So instead of my supervisor teaching the methods, I found people in other universities who were more than happy to help, for what that is worth. With lack of lab space can you ask your supervisor for help? He might be a bully but bullies are usually the best people at getting stuff out of the bureaucracy.

Getting another PhD will be hard. If you want to get a PhD this supervisor is your best bet. Only you can decide if it is worth it, we can help with ideas to make it more bearable but the final decision is yours.

It might be an issue if your first "job" after university you quit after a year. They might be worrying that you will quit on them, and they might not want to take the risk. Plus if the interviewer sees a PhD as just another degree without realising the sheer scale, it could be a pain, as HR departments are not known for their intellect.

Iwan, I would rebrand the PhD as a "research assistant". Make up an excuse for the sudden departure, like family issues to explain or that it the research funding got cut unexpectedly. If you make leaving the PhD as more unfortunate circumstances and less "it wasn't for me", the better.

I am assuming that you want to be a university lecturer but you are wondering what department you will end up/ what department you can teach in.

From my vague experience, you teach what is as close as possible to your undergrad degree/experience as possible. But your department is closest to your research. Ie you can teach the mathematics modules in an engineering course if you did a BSc in mathematics. For your case, you could teach the business side of things, which could be managing group projects in IT. Or you could teach some computational stuff in a music course (if that is a thing). The point is that subjects contain many modules, and one is bound to overlap with your expertise.

Also a good teacher can teach nearly anything, so if this is worrying you can try and get as much teaching experience as possible during your PhD. Do all those stupid courses and try apply them during teaching if you can apply them. I have also heard people bribing students to get a nomination for best teaching, to put on their CV. All that will make it easier to sell in an interview that you can teach another subject

BUT I will say that, most academic job interviews don't give a sh*t about teaching and only care about publications. That is why the teaching at top universities is usually so bad.

Hope that helps and isn't too wrong.

does you chair know what grounded theory actually is? They might have literally heard a talk on it and think it is easy, so you could try and explain to them how difficult it is.

You have done well to get 5 chapters written, so don't let a supervisor ruin that

Hi Johnnie,

You have two real options for getting a PhD in the UK;

1. Apply for an already funded project
2. Make your own project and apply for funding

If you choose option 1, places like findaphd.com is your best bet but they don't have an astronomy sectrion (they do have astrophysics). This method usually has funding and a supervisor already in place. Though you don't get to choose the project and it some supervisors can be awful.

Option 2 is far harder. You need to find your own project, a willing supervisor and then apply for funding. This is far harder but has more academic freedom. Don't much about this way but you can ask again iof you go down this path.

On a subject basis, I think you can easily apply mathematics to astronomy. (note I am an engineer with no experience in astronomy or maths). From my experience astrophysics is very mathematics heavy so you will have some of the right skills already and that is how you can sell yourself. Research is becoming ever more cross-disciplinary, so moving fields is possible if you have the right skills or knowledge.

You ask what field you should be targeting? - preferably a field that you think you can dedicate three years of your life to. Not joking you. The best topic will be something that you are motivated about because three years is a loong time.

Hope that helps and good luck,
rewt

You say that but someone said the same thing two days ago to me. I will probably do their idea if I could find enough people to help organize it.

Good to know someone else did it as well.

Hi Dody,

What are you making a complaint about? Viva result, supervisor, dismissal? We cant help without some more facts as to give you good advice.

Sorry for being harsh,
Rewt

Sorry for the rant, it is was an odd day yesterday. Most of the time my supervisor is really good about giving feedback, helping with administration, and general supervision. She just doesn't want to talk about methodologies.

To be honest, my project is my supervisor's idea and it could open a new sub-field if successful. However, I can't make a key substrate in high enough quantities to follow the initial methodology, therefore I need to change something. The easiest way is to move to goal posts and prove 4/5ths of the concept by different methods, which should be enough for my thesis. But I can't do that final fifth without some new expensive equipment, therefore, we can't get that AAA+ paper that directly leads to a lot of further work or we even possibly get gazumped. So really she wants the initial idea to work so that it helps her career but doesn't want to hear that we can't do it.

Fortunately, I have got my second supervisor (who is more of a formality than an actual supervisor) to organize an official meeting for all of us about my transfer report. I have sent a draft version of my transfer to both of them, were it says the initial method didn't work - I am changing. I am hoping that I can make it real to her in that meeting, so that she starts helping me.

BTW: My two supervisors are very good friends in real life, which might be good or bad.

PS: I tried emailing her directly about my methodology issues to her, but she usually cc'es someone else in with the reply saying "so and so might have something that might be useful for INSERT SOME RANDOM IDEA". Via email, she deflects and results in me having more work, so I have stopped emailing about this

Completely agree. The problem is the most visible holders of PhDs are academics, therefore people assume that a PhD leads to academia. While the majority of PhD holders disappear into the industry and drop the Dr status, diminishing their visibility and thus people don't realise that the majority of PhD holders go there.

I think some PhD recruitment offices need to make clear that the most likely career path is industry, not academia. But that might reduce applications, and we can't have that!