don't worry! in the UK the majority of PhD students are non-native English speakers and they all manage! once you live in the UK English will become the natural language of thinking for you - in particular at work!!

same here. i cannot motivate myself at all. had a paper deadline yesterday, that was ok, but now that i have to go back to writing up the thesis .... i am surfing the web, having coffee breaks, dreaming away .... i cannot stand reading over my chapters again. especially the early ones - i now think they are complete rubbish, but no time to change. submission is coming faaaaaaaast.

depends on the country you want to do the Phd in. in the UK, a lot of people go into a PhD straight after their bachelor's degree, that is not a problem.

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it's not only quantity that counts, but also quality. in my field, the top 2-3 conferences have acceptance rates well below 20% (moves closer toward 10% every year). if you get 2 papers published during the course of your PhD in those conferences you are done. on the other hand, 10 workshop papers hardly count for anything, because the acceptance rate of workshops can be up to 100%. Similarly for journals, 1 journal article in a high impact journal is worth more than 10 publications in really poorly performing journals. if you concentrate on your work and publish 1-2 really, really good papers/articles, you are fine as well.

no. why should the German government do this anyway? they do fund however internships (going off to a research group abroad for a year or so), whilst doing the PhD in Germany.

don't blame your references - with the recession going on, more and more people seriously consider doing a PhD, often those that are really good and would have otherwise gone straight into industry to earn heaps of money.

Why don't you just write a polite email, asking the supervisors why they rejected you? Much better than continue guessing about if one of your references makes you look bad! I am sure, the supervisors don't mind to give an honest answer.

which countries are you looking at? i definitely know that in quite a few countries in europe professors are more than happy to take you on, if you have your own funding. have you looked at countries without tuition fees (i guess in Britain it could be a problem). what field are you in?

wait for the report! who knows, maybe things are not that bad after all - a friend of mine got major revisions, but once he got the report, the work could actually be done within 2 months. He resubmitted and that was that! Try not to think about it too hard, until you know where exactly the reviewers think you need to do more work! Good luck! and don't despair!!!!

write one last email along the lines of .. "as i haven't heard back from you, i assume you are satisfied with the draft. i will submit the paper next week"

that gives them one last chance. it is ridiculous to come again and again to beg for comments - i have the same problem, now i just submit after a certain period of time, without sending numerous reminders.

you are lucky, i hardly get any editing and if i get feedback, then it is only about my English (i am non-native), never about the content.

what a joke! look how many permanent members of staff each department has - maybe a handful, the vast majority are postdocs! once i get a permanent position, i will surely not complain about the pay (because THEN the advantages are many - secure job, decent pay, lots of traveling etc), but lets face it, the average academic is NOT a permanent member of staff.
friends of mine went through 3-4 postdoc positions in different countries before they finally found something permanent.

it was supposed to be the after-viva money. it is an engineering department btw, which i thought would pay decent rates. i am aware that a university job only pays ~50% of an industry job, but even so, it should be enough to afford a living. renting a flat, paying council tax, food, clothes etc would pretty much take up all of the 1300 pounds. i stayed at uni for about 10 years for my undergraduates + phd studies, i had hoped that this would pay off financially at least somewhat :-(

20% of 1300 pounds, not 1600 pounds!

thanks for the info! i guess i have a somewhat screwed perspective because i am now earning euros, and when doing the pound-euro conversion it is close to 1:1 - for me, the salary would mean a 20% pay-cut compared to my PhD salary :-(

Hi,

i am about to finish my Phd, and already started looking for a postdoc position. I talked to a prof in the UK, and apparently there are some postdocs on offer which pay (after taxes - i am not married, no kids if that plays a role here) less than 1300 pounds a month. Is that normal?? It sounds incredibly low to me!

monkey