So, here it is... We've spoken about it several times so I decided to open this thread. To stop us hijacking other threads with our PhD talk/whinging

*clears throat*

My name is Babybird2 and I'm doing a PhD in cell biology.

I'm trying to write my thesis

Sounds like an AA meeting!

My name is Jacobi and I'm doing a PhD in numerical linear algebra maths

I'm clutching onto the final days of the 2nd year, before the Big Scary final year starts !

Fun! I had no idea so many people were doing phds.

My name is Jen and I am doing a phd in Engineering. I have just started my 3rd year...its very scary.

I hated 3rd year and still do now that I only have *counts* 14 days left of it

You'll all be ok though, You've come this far

I'm Chris, and I finished my PhD 24 years ago
(on Supersymmetry/Supergravity if anyone's interested - I can remember hardly any of it now ...)

Chris

Have you got any good advice for those of us who are currently struggling?

A few years ago I thought about doing a PhD. I was working in a university at the time, doing research as my job, and it was the ideal time to go for it. However, quite a few of my teaching colleagues were doing theirs and they got so stressed out about it all, that it put me off.

I finished a PhD on South African literature 7 years ago. (The biggest challenge for me was writing it in French )

I'll bite - three years ago last week I'd just finished.

i) Start writing up sooner rather than later. There's a lot of boilerplate background material that is independent on the precise topic chosen within your field.

ii) When writing up, if there is writing up to be done that could be done, aim for 500 words a day. Hypothetically, this might seem like it would encourage you to write any old carp to hit the target, but try it.

iii) Aim to finish in advance, not just on time. It's rare to get a three year period that is completely trouble-free in both your private and professional lives. I was aiming for 2 years 8 months, which slipped to 2 years 11 months by the end, with two deceased relatives and a few weeks of daily hospital visits for another along the way.

iv) Tutor or lab demonstrator work may seem like easy cash, but work out what impact it's having on your working week, and decide how much or any you have time to do - be realistic.

Finally, if you want to stay in academia, unless you've got the means to get by out of your own pocket, think about follow-on funding before your PhD funding finishes.

It's too late for me for most of that

I'd like to do a Ph.D some day?
I shall observe this thread

I now have two weeks until I have to give a talk in a seminar series at the Uni!

I avoided the blanket email asking for volunteers to speak, but then I got asked specifically by the organizer of the series...

It did remind me of this though:

I finished mine 15 years ago - "Iron Sulphur Proteins From Bovine Heart NADH-Ubiquinone Oxidoreductase"

It was the hardest thing I've ever done and I spilt (quite literally) blood, sweat and tears over it. I still sometimes find it hard to believe that they actually awarded me the PhD at the end of it - but I do remember the graduation ceremony and I've got a certificate somewhere.

I have no idea how people manage to do a PhD and practice an instrument / spend time on forums. My life for the last couple of years was quite literally home, lab, home to bed, get up and back to lab 7 days a week. Hours in the lab were 12+ per day. One of my colleagues used to regularly do 36 hour stints because once he'd started a procedure he couldn't leave until it had finished. I got so fed up with non-scientists telling me "surely negative results tell you just as much as positive results". I could have written many theses on how not to purify/refold/crystallise various proteins but they wouldn't have got me anywhere!

Can I join this club please pretty please....

I've got a funny background but I started a PhD 12-ish years ago and didn't finish it due to illness.

I'm now doing a Masters in Fine Art and the next 12 months will be a combination of thesis and paintings for a Degree Show... so it's still post-graduate research based academic work.

At the moment I'm not intending to progress the MFA on to a PhD because ultimately I'm a painter.... but never say never!! However, I do think I've hit on an original concept and will have enough material to write a book but I think I would aim at an 'art-book' rather than a PhD thesis.


But I love being a 'student' and will never stop exploring the world academically

You will only finish when you accept that the thesis is not going to be perfect.

I agree with Keriboe- If you're not careful you can end up rewriting over and over again to get your thesis perfect.

I finished my PhD in 1995 (New models for coenzyme B12 dependent reactions).
What I find quite shocking is that the work that took me 3 years to perform I could probably do in about six months now- mainly because now I would be more willing to stand up to my superviser and have more trust in my own work. I also took about 5 months to write up my thesis (ca 150 pages) whereas now I'll regularily write 100 page reports in under a week.

When you're writing up your thesis- keep an eye on the references- much easier these days with the present versions of word processors. At the end of my writing up I ended up with about a thousand papers strewed across the floor trying to match up the reference numbers with papers (a few ended up as personal communications because I couldn't find the papers- at that time you had to put the reference numbers in manually so removing one would mean changing all the subsequent numbers- what fun !)

I am in my second year of a PhD in Sociolinguistics. Currently trying to:
- get some more data
- write first two chapters
- look after a 5 year old
- incubate twins
- revise for Grade 5 Theory
- have some sort of family life

Will I ever finish??!

Yes, when your twins sleep through the night
I had both my daughters while writing my PhD thesis. The younger one wanted to feed every 2 1/2 hours day and night and after a couple of months I was suffering from sleep deprivation. At about five months she gave up all her night feeds in one go, I slept solidly for about a week and woke up one morning thinking I've got a thesis to finish. This was when I decided it didn't have to be perfect, I just wanted to finish - and did. (And got the highest possible grade for it, so although it wasn't perfect in my eyes it was more than satisfactory for the examiners).

I couldn't imagine having kids while writing this thing

But then, I'm 24 and couldn't imagine having kids - thesis or no thesis!

I got my PhD nearly a year ago. Still trying to work out what I can actually do with it, so have decided to retrain in something completely different.

Best advice I was given when I was writing my thesis was "don't get it right, just get it written" along with having copious amounts of tea/coffee/chocs/cakes on tap. Looking back, I now also wish that had I known that I had to pay to get my thesis hard bound and wasn't going to be able to keep a copy, that I had gone for the lime green/tangerine option and not the more conservative one. Thinking about it that's the other piece of advice I would give, let the binders know in advance.

Good luck to everyone doing a PhD.

[cripes my first ever emoticon... pause for audience applause... ... ... ... not a sausage*]
(*~quoting Bluebottle in The Goons)

My husband's v eminent Head of Department told him it was only a piece of paper to allow to him to take the next step.

I burnt mine, which explains why I'm where I am. So don't try that. Even if you're really cold and have no money for the gas meter.

Someone I knew who wrote his thesis in the days before computers and word processors said he used to keep his typed pages in the freezer because he had decided that this was the only thing which would survive the house burning down

I got my PhD 25 years ago (doesn't seem that long) and since then have supervised 10 PhD's, 2 reseach MSc's and a reseach MD all in epithelial physiology / electrophysiology.



In my experience the major cause of difficulties comes when students start to do something, decide it isn't working properly so change something (or possibly 2 or 3 things), when that doesn't seem to be working either they then make another few changes. Before you know it months have passed and they have completely lost track of what they were trying to do in the first place and have nothing to show for it.



You are only judged on what you finish and you can only make proper judgements from an experiment that has been properly finished and analysed.



Often, if people has stuck with the orginal experimental design, the experiment that "wasn't working" would have told them somethin once they had repeated it 5 or 6 times and done a proper analysis of the data. It might not have been a very exciting or interesting result, but the experience of sticking with somthing and seeing it through properly does teach you a lot.



It's only when you've got the results of several different experiments, all properly carried out and analysed, that you start thinking "I have a feeling I know what's going on here" and it a proper story begins to emerge.



So my advise would be stick at everything you start until it is properly finished!

Well I'm supposed to be writing, but having spent the past few days moving house I have absolutely no energy and have lost where I was at with the writing. Am currently trying to get my brain out of house moving mode and into thesis writing mode.

I thought about a PhD after I'd finished my degree but didn't want to stay on after all my friends had left - I just thought I'd be too lonely as none of my group of friends were staying. I sometimes now wish I had carried on but I thought I'd do a performance postgrad and in the end didn't get in anyway so ended up doing a PGCE (biggest waste of my time as I ended up teaching piano for nigh on 20 years and only did 6 months in the classroom....... I hated both my PGCE year and my classroom teaching so I would have been better doing a PhD I reckon.)

Surely that's inevitable! Learning to do anything takes ages, and doing a PhD is part of the learning process.

Just think how long it took you to master a grade 5 piece when you were at that level. Once you've achieved grade 8, you can sightread a similar piece, but you'd never have reached that point without going through the earlier grind.

Good luck to all those doing PhDs - hang on in there, because you'll feel great once you have that doctorate.

Can I lurk here? I am thinking about doing a "part time" PhD with the Open University.

Don't do it!

If I could go back, knowing what I do now, I'd never have done a PhD.

I was one of those annoying people at school who got top grades in all my exams without appearing to put in much effort (I did work for them, just less than others, but more steadily and I suspect more efficiently). I went through my first degree in pretty much the same manner getting a first without compromising on social life etc. A PhD seemed the logical next step - I had a great CV, as well as the academics I'd spent a summer in the research labs of a pharma company and I was offered a place in one of the best labs in the country (in fact, certainly at that time, probably one of the best in the world), not that I realised just how good it was when I applied or I'd probably have ruled it out. That's when it all went horribly wrong, the research was just so much harder than the book learning. I did what I'd always done in the past when things had got hard and put in some extra effort, but this time the effort didn't do the trick. At the time I tended to put it down to the fact that the project I'd undertaken was especially challenging (which was true), but now I can admit that scientific research just wasn't the right career path for me.

I have found a career that challenges me, is interesting and most importantly for my own satisfaction I'm good at, but it's not something I'd have considered in my university days. I do find some of the skills I acquired doing my PhD are useful, an analytical approach, an eye for detail and patience being key.

Can I join in? Only just noticed this thread today

I'm clinging to the last few weeks of my third year of a PhD in Maths. Need to finish a year from now at the latest, but there's so much to do!

One thing I've learned is that I do not want a job where I'm stuck at a desk all day - sometimes the time seems to pass so slowly and I end up staring out of the window (or using my friend the internet to procrastinate...like now). Can't say I've ever been particularly enthusiastic about my work, but some dodgy supervision hasn't helped much, along with a complete lack of confidence in myself most of the time.

Oh dear, I'm not a very good advertisement for doing a PhD, am I?

obviously you have good taste!




I don't think you are alone there! I find it is much easier when teaching starts up again as it breaks the day up, it is very difficult to concentrate on doing exactly the same thing for 5 hours without a change of task!

That's interesting. I find that the way teaching breaks up the day really disrupts the flow of my work - especially if I'm doing fieldwork, transcribing, data analysis/mapping or writing. I'm forever ending up with odd 45-50 minute bits in the day between tutorials and seminars and I don't find this long enough to actually get any meaningful work done.

That's true. Sometimes it's a welcome break if you're not really in the mood for working, but it can be annoying if you have to stop doing something that you're engrossed in!

I've never done any teaching

I don't 'teach' as such (i.e. lecture). I just help out in large-group tutorials, i.e. wander round and help the students. Not nearly as scary as proper teaching would be!

I thought it would be something like that. Haven't done that either though

Fantastic . I have five days of conference ahead of me, so I'll keep an eye on it; and, of course, try not to fall into any of those pitfalls myself .

And here comes another week of me trying to motivate myself to do something

I've run out of printing credits as well, and they don't get topped up until the start of October. I really, really, really need to print the chapter I'm working on to see what I'm doing in terms of restructuring the middle section and linking it all together - it's not working trying to do it on the computer screen because I can't see enough of it at once.

*wonders if a supervisor can be found and persuaded to print it*

I haven't even bought a printer credit in over 3 years

I do have 22 though. I'm not quite sure why.

I've never had any printing credit

Luckily where I am the printer is just down the corridor and we don't get charged for using it (unless we start printing 1000s of pages per day!). We also get free photocopying!

I don't think you should have to pay for printing, undergrads maybe as there are so many but we shouldn't!

Hmmm. Most departments here charge postgrads the same as undergrads - 4p per A4 black and white page and 48p for an A4 colour page. This is what I'd pay if I had to print anything on the main university network.

My department has its own network (which is separate to the uni one) and we get a printing and photocopying allocation for each academic year. It's £36 of printing credits which is equivalent to 1800 black and white pages (colour is more than that so if you only print in colour you'd get 600 pages) and 800 pages of A4 photcopying. You can only top up the printing credits by multiples of £10 and they wipe your account each year when they put the next allocation on. I don't want to pay for £10 of printing credits when the whole lot will then be wiped at the start of October.

So, what are you all planning on doing after your PhDs?

The following comes to mind
with some unless I find a job!

I meant on the job front

I'll probably be working in Morrissons. LOL.

I think that is a dream job for me.

I got rejected by McDonalds when I was in college!

I've never tried to apply for McDonalds. I'd probably get rejected too

Hoping for a miracle improvement in the academic job market.

Hoping for a miracle improvement in the industry job market (so, please everyone, commission new skyscrapers/very expensive buildings )

My boyfriend's comment about jobs...."become a mum".

Err, I don't think so.