I'm almost 9 months into my CASE PhD studentship.

I seem to spend a lot of my time writing up notes for my frequent meetings within my own department and with other professionals from other unis. Does anyone else do this?! I kind of feel like a glorified admin/secretary person! I don't mind taking notes in meetings,in fact, it does clarify my own thoughts about my PhD and other projects, but at the moment, it seems its almost expected of me to take the bulk of the note taking, despite being surrounded by other researchers, (abliet non phd)! Any thoughts/comments will be appreciated. I'm probably being a little moany, but surely, my time could be better spent working on my ethics applications and my literature reviews (like other first years I know are involved in!).

You should speak to someone about this. At our meetings we used to have one of the admin girls take minutes, or one of the RAs.

And I bet they really love it when you call them "admin girls" to their faces.

Are the meetings directly related to your PhD?
If not, then they're taking the piss as it isnt your job.

The meetings are related to my PhD; but when the meetings starts to dip into other areas which I'm not directly involved with, I start to wonder whether I should be taking extensive note taking or whether they are taking advantage!

piglet - you mean like how they refer to themselves as the admin girls?

That used to happen to me too Pineapple (although I was working there at the time). I just asked if it would be okay to take turns in minute taking as this seemed to be common practice elsewhere. I didn't mind doing it sometimes, just not all the time! It worked and all was fine. My other reasoning is that I found that constant minute taking affected my ability to contribute the meeting as much as I would like (I was too busy scribbling!)

fluffymonster - that's why we usually have someone else take the minutes (someone who is actually trained to take minutes, there's a short training session run by the university for administrative staff specifically about coordinating meetings, which includes how best to take minutes). The one RA who does take notes actually volunteered.

Thanks fluffymonster (great name by the way!)you've described exactly how I'm feeling. Particuarly, when I'm meeting directors and commissioners, most of my time is spent scribbling away and as a result, I end up contributing little or anything to the discussions due to concentrating on getting all of the key points down (which is usually expected of me to take note).