Phd'ers, how much time do you spend or are you expected to spend on your campus? I'm asking this as I start in Sept and need to arrange childcare. Is it expected you are on campus 9-5 each day in your first year or is it more felxible than this? I just wanted to sound out first before asking the Dept as I don't want them to think I can't make the commitment because of childcare, I can I just need to know how much childcare I need so I can balance phD life with my children (yes I know, for balance read ....cram everything in ha ha). Thanks in advance.

I think it depends a lot on a number of things. Mostly though, it'll probably come down to your supervisors.

I live a bit out of town and I spoke to my supervisor about difficulty travelling to the office and he's happy for me to work from home. I come into the office only for meetings or when I feel I really need to concentrate on my work. Right now I haven't been in the office for about 3 weeks and when I am in it's often for a couple of hours once week.

In my first year I was rarely in the office at all since most of what I was doing was reading. I think my office desk lay vacant for the first 3 months and after that it wasn't used often.

Obviously the type of PhD you're doing might change this. I work in software development so there's no lab work. Everything I do can be just as easily done at home as in the office.

Mines Humanities/social science so no equipment needed, mainly reading and writing. This sounds promising then as I need to keep childcare costs down. Thanks

hi wowzers, I think it always depends on your supervisor so it's best to discuss this with him or her :-)

mine was ok about working at home, and that gave me some freedom to arrange my own time :-)

on the other hand, my colleague in another faculty had a really tyrannical supervisor who insisted on 9 to 5 attendance in the lab, fill up the lab-book every single day because he would check it. He also demanded that she read at least 20 papers every week, and expected small reports from her about these papers (which were not exactly related to her phd). She had a very difficult time working under this person, how she complained and she was always stressed, thankfully she did not have childcare to worry about (her mother took over)---but guess what, she finished her phd in slightly over 3 years. In all that difficulty, she produced over 10 conference papers!

are you excited about starting the phd? :-)

love satchi

Thanks Satchi. Absolutely can't wait, so excited. I've a first meeting this week for some summer prep reading :-) Hopefully I'll still be excited 3 years on ha ha.