Hi everyone,

Our Faculty still has some fully-funded full-time studentships available for the next academic year, starting in October, as well as part-time (unfunded) studentships. The fully-funded ones include fees, a fund to support career development and training and a stipend that is not overtly generous but enough to live on (and can be supplemented if the student has dependents). AS you can see in the advertisement, the Faculty is highly interdisciplinary and our staff include critical psychologists and sociologists, social geographers, and people experienced in Q methodology. The studentships are available to international students (i.e. from anywhere in the world), our over-riding concern being the capability to work hard, finish on time and produce an excellent thesis. Your help would be much appreciated in passing on information about this opportunity to your students.

The Open University is a radically different university in two ways: its undergraduate courses are open to all UK citizens without any requirements for qualifications, designed in the 1960s to be the 'university of the second chance' with partucular support for disadvantages and disabled students. In my 30+ years here (I retire in September) I have taught prisoners, people living in mental instititions for the criminally insane, paraplegic students unable to move their limbs, deaf, blind, dyslexic and wheelchair-bound students. But mostly a whole diversity of incredibly devoted and determined people of all ages who have gainedf degrees alongside doing their jobs and often bringing up children. We have about 20, 000 undergraduate students at any one time, but none on campus other than our own staff. We do, though, have a number (about 200 I think, but maybe more) postgraduate students here in Milton keynes, who, because of this, are treated much more like staff than students. Coming here to do a PhD means belonging to our academic community in a way not possible in conventional universities.

Our Faculty is especially welcoming, and we have a vibrant doctoral student group doing all sorts of really interesting projects around topics in health and in social care. Milton Keynes is a large, new city about an hour north of London, and about the same from Oxford and Cambridge. It is also close to Luton and Stanstead airports (buses to each go regularly) which makes much of Europe easy to get to and often cheaply. The city itself has an amazing shopping centre full of palm trees and lots of light, a snowdome so you can ski all year, a theatre, art gallery and lots of woods and waterways, ye olde English pubs and even a peace pagoda.

Thanks in advance for helping us find some brilliant students.

Best Wishes

Wendy