100% agree with this. I think you're making the mistake of focusing too much on the relationship with your supervisor and not on your PhD. And tough criticism is something that just comes with it.

Yeah. My previous post explains why. This module started halfway through the year and a lot of them had just stopped attending everything by that point.

Rewt I love that suggestion! I'm not sure I'd get away with it where I am. I also didn't attend alot when I was an undergrad but I never had the balls to email the lecturer to ask, I used to rely on friends!

I've been told by the programme director that there are a number of students not attending anything due to health/personal issues. The nature of the degree and the subject area seems to be triggering a lot. As well as one student who won't attend because I remind him of his ex girlfriend...

No it is. Research methods...:)

Thank you so much for the advice. Teaddict, luckily the student evaluations were before this started happening. The students who have been attending were the only ones who filled them out. So they were sparse but positive :) I've gone with Tudor queen and psych 1's advice and made contact with the cohort as a whole and arrangements to have a drop in.

The lack of attendance started in week one. So I'm not sure how this could be down to my teaching style or how I have blamed the students. It is a compulsory module which might have something to do with it.

I was wondering whether any of you have had experience dealing with students who don't attend lectures and seminars. This is a Masters cohort and the attendance has been appalling (20 out of 80 average attendance). This is apparently a problem with the cohort across all modules so I haven't taken it personally.

However, now that the deadline for the assessment is coming up, I am being inundated with students emailing me asking me questions that I have already covered in sessions that I know they haven't attended (from registers).I am struggling with responding to emails without being scolding of not attending (and when I have done that, the students have lied and said they did attend "but still don't understand!"). How would you deal with this? I am so fed up of repeating myself but the powers above say that we have to be seen to be responding to students!

100% support them. Ten thousand per year off your pension is too significant not to take action. What most of my colleagues on strike have found is that most students also support the strikes and have been on the picket lines with them. It is the students who don’t even bother to turn up to class that all of a sudden care about losing out.

More importantly, this isn’t just academic staff who this is affecting. Lecturers are being targeted for being selfish when actually non-academic staff are also striking.

It’s a public forum? And I’m the snowflake when you’re offended by a complete stranger?
Sorry for causing offence either way. OP, let us know how the business cards go down and good luck with the job hunting.

Sorry, I was agreeing with you. And disagreeing with the person who said dressing smartly reeks of desperation. I’ve never heard such rubbish. Keynote speakers wear suits most of the time. Id hardly call people in that position desperate.

What a load of shite, dressing nicely reeks of desperation! How does what you wear have any bearing on your reputation as a scholar?! At a conference you will find a mix, some people dress smart and some people really don't.

As for business cards, there is nothing wrong with them at all. Although if it is for conferences, I have found handouts to be more successful (so if you were presenting a poster, a smaller version of the poster etc).

I think it's fine to work where's best for you, but at my uni there is a waiting list for offices so might be worth letting the uni know if you don't need that workspace so it can go to someone else.

They usually do yes. And your question is a really good one. I asked a similar question about which journals they thought would be good to publish in.

Why would you even want to talk to your friends in detail about your PhD? Do you ask them about their jobs in great detail? No one will ever find our PhD as important or as interesting as we do, unfortunately.

I know you are saying that the are talking about holidays, mortgages etc, but those are not job related things. Your PhD at the end of the day, is your job. Try to focus on other aspects to chat to your friends too like the travelling that you get to do at conferences.

Three months in is really no need to stress about not hearing much from your supervisor. As others said, the support increases more when you are further along. And don't compare yourself to how he treats his other students. It isn't really any of your business how much time he devotes to other students. This supervisory relationship will always mean more to you than it will your supervisor

The question was about challenges that higher ed institutions are facing currently, Brexit was my personal answer. But that was for a lecturing role to be fair and not a PhD position. I am guessing for a PhD position, questions about timescales and challenging workloads could come up? Also perhaps managing your relationship with your supervisor and with other students.