A doctorate in McMarking?
Being a postgraduate student has always been hard but it is getting so much more difficult. As universities are squeezed, a great deal of pressure is applied to staff and through them to research...
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New elite's threat to cream off cash
Potential PhD students could find that they can only get public funding if they secure places at top-rated university departments, as a result of a proposal published this week. The major review has...
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Seeds for ideas
As part of our series on finding funds, we look at the Economic and Social Research Council's funding stream aimed at younger researchers, often overlooked by postgraduates. And we talk to some...
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Adrian Beck, 32
Recently Adrian Beck accompanied Dutch police officers in a factory raid. They were looking for illegal immigrants working there, but although none were found, he was able to observe how the non-...
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Jacky Boivin, 31
She is less than a year into her ESRC-funded research, but Jacky Boivin is already "very excited" about her findings. Her interest is in the relationship between stress and infertility, in particular...
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Seth Armitage, 31
A lecturer in finance in Edinburgh University's department of business studies, SethArmitage had no great hopes of getting an ESRC research grant at his first application. "Everybody said you can try...
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Move over The Bill, here comes The Lab
Stuffed to the gills with doctors and police officers, television drama misses out on the appeal of science. Olga Wojtas discovers a plan to correct this. Bob Robinson, professor of biological...
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Uma Kothari, 35
An ESRC studentship helped Uma Kothari spend time in India in the 1980s studying small peasant farmers who became quite wealthy from sugar cane production. Five years after gaining a PhD at Edinburgh...
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Foot in mouth disease hits nation
Chris Hatton reports on a serious and growing threat to the mental health of the research community. Recent advances in psychiatry have identified a new syndrome sweeping the nation's research...
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Doctoring the degree
Aisling Irwin on doctorates experimenting with vivas and theses. Imagine a doctorate with no viva. Instead, the student must give an open defence of their thesis, which anyone can attend. The first...
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Misfits, misprints, mistakes...
Allan Reese wants to know why PhD theses still look so shoddy. The PhD thesis should be taken by the scruff of its neck and dragged into the 21st century. In the age of CD-Roms, multimedia and...
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A rock in a hard place
Susan Hawley is stretching the boundaries of theological research. Elaine Williams reports. Held up by a road block, at the mercy of bandits in the northern mountains of Nicaragua between Managua and...
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Rich remark
No signs of deficit financing at King's College, Cambridge even if the foundations of its fortune were laid by Keynes during his period as bursar. Those attending a recent fundraising event were on...
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Uninspired spelling
Always priding itself as a source of wit, vitality and new ideas, the Cambridge Union has taken up the neglected cause of spelling reform. This term's programme includes such imaginative coinages as...
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OJ speaks
Alumnus No: 48 follows in the Oxford Union's tradition that its guest speakers from the world of sport should epitomise the highest traditions of fair play, sportsmanship and above all exemplary off-...