A 1st year PhD student is expected to read (or at least have) 100-200 references in their 1st year thesis. I guess Lit Review itself will contain 75% of those references.

I guess it is better to start writing now as you do your reading. It is impossible to read everything and write them out in one go!

My reaction? tired.. just very very tired

SlackJack, I guess you're not alone.. I've never really had anxiety attacks but I can feel it building up inside me as I'm going through my 1st year. My supervisor is great - that helps a lot. Not much pressure for him and he lets me do my own work. BUT, that can be bad sometimes - I tend to become over self-motivated.

Maybe valium pills can help????? =(

Using office 2007, to me, is a serious waste of time - although it is the standard program in most institutes. Importing a graph from excel into word will convert it into a JPEG Picture. It loses the quality of the fonts & the graphs. If you resize them, you'll find big pixels in your report - not cool at all.

I finally found a solution. iWork 09 (Apple's MS WORD) works hand in hand with Numbers (Apple's Excel) and anything you import remains its quality. What I do is I export my entire report as a .pdf so no quality is loss. As a result, you get a "High Definition" report with crystal clear & sharp graphs. Beautiful.

Hi Pamw and guys, well.. I AM indeed on the same boat and mine's sinking. I am fully sponsored by quite a big international company. The initial VERBAL agreement with them is 15k GBP stipend as per advertised. When I started in Jan2009, they revised the budget and gave the "recession" reasons. Real enough, they've shut down one of their UK production plant. They've cut down my stipend from 15000GBP to just 4000GBP for this particular year. Luckily, I'm not based in London town.

I guess everything is expensive these days and at times like this. Does anyone here works part time? How do you even find the time to work part time (for those who are married and/or with dependents)???

Here's my 2p worth of complains.. I don't have the same problem with my industrial partner like you, but a much bigger one. I'm sponsored by Honeywell and they're a notably quite big international company. This recession must have hit them "hard" and they cut my stipend from 15000GBP to just 4000GBP for this year. Sigh...(down)

As for me, I'm a current PhD student and my wife just followed me to the UK - and she isn't working at the moment. I was working last year and managed to pull out a mortgage right before the massive recession. I guess currently it will be a bit tough to get a mortgage as a PhD student status, even if you have an excellent credit score. Due to our income range, the bank will definitely lend us way lesser - that's IF they decided to lend us. Personally, I've got a "deferred" mortgage meaning I'll only start paying in 2010 when my property is ready (and also when my PhD finishes). If anything goes wrong along the way, I'm screwed. :-(