Well that's a cheerful message to read today!

Have you tried talking to your superviser about whether a paper (or more) could be produced out of the thesis? (OK, working on that would delay submission but it would help if you're looking for post-doc positions)

Skillwise - think of things from a different viewpoint, eg: you can claim project management experience from having managed whatever research you carried out.

Have you tried creeping round your research council to try and squeeze some more money out of them. A friend of mine (from the year below me at school) had over-run and managed to get a bit more out of them and she is officially doctored tomorrow.

In our house we have a maths phd person (who is getting more than the rest of us) and his budgeting is appalling - mind you so is his mental arithmetic. One simple measure he could take that would save a lot of money would be to abandon the take away dinner!

Smile, be happy, go perform at a Christmass concert and then go and get drunk!

While I was doing my PhD (1991-1994) I got £4000 a year. I didn't earn 18K until I'd been working for about 5 years.

How times have changed

I am a linguist - currently on maternity leave though and have already forgotten what I used to do all day!

Ah ok, well having a baby is certainly not something that would come into my PhD routine.

Guess what I've done today.



It feels a bit weird...

did you submit.......? did ya, did ya?

Have you... done it?

Yes.

oh well done

I remember when I submitted mine..... I remember thinking "well what the h**l am I supposed to do now". it was all a bit of an anticlimax.

Be happy?

I know what you mean. I know I should be bouncing around and really happy and part of me is, but a lot of me is confused about how to feel. It's actually a bit of a non-event - there's hardly anyoone around in the department (and none of the people I really know), no-one else is in the office today and of course to the admin people in the graduate school it's a totally routine event.

It's only the first version that's gone in, and I suppose knowing that it will need to be redone post-viva kind of means it doesn't feel finished.

But most of it is done

I'm really pleased for you

WELL DONE!!!


It's one of the few times we get to party on this thread, so I'm going to do just that!

I tried to think of it in terms of how many actual work-hours I would still have to put in before I officially passed:

4 hours: rereading thesis the day before the viva
3 hours: viva

.... and that's all I could come up with...... think about it.... only 7 more hours work to go and it will be over. Corrections don't generally take long (if you've had a halfway decent supervisor). The best advice I can give is to do them straight away....go out and party on viva evening and start your corrections the day after. So many of my friends took a week or two off after their viva and they found it ridiculously difficult to actually come back to the office and work. Once you've done them you can forget about it forever!

Thanks both of you.

Excellent, well done
Wooo-hooo!!

I think once you submit the thesis the finishing line is in sight, granted there is the viva etc but you are close!

Many, many congratulations Flossie : that's brilliant news

Flossie!

It's awesome. Hopefully I'll get there myself one day.

You'll get there

Woah! Congrats Flossie!

Thanks everyone.

I'm happy now - it's started to feel real. There's been people in the department today and they're all really pleased.

I don't think it had really sunk it yet yesterday, because I felt more like crying than anything else.

Your turn next, Babybird2.

My friend has now been in her viva for 4 hours. I'm getting a bit worried because vivas are typically between 2.5-3 hours. The last person who went over 3.5 hours didn't pass...

I heard about someone once who had a viva that was 7 hours long

She'd gone down the pub with our supervisor and her examiners. Despite the fact that she's got stressed in the past waiting for other people's vivas it didn't occur to her that we were all starting to worry, and she didn't reply to the person who'd texted her because she didn't want to say anything about it in front of the examiners - I can kind of understand, but all we needed was a one-word text back from her. As it was, she had not reappeared, our supervisor had gone, the room used for the viva was empty, no email had come round to say that she'd passed and she didn't reply to the person who texted her - which was kind of a concerning combination for the rest of us!

Babybird.

I'm on here now. Thought we ought to stop taking the snow thread off-topic.

how is it going?

Umm.. it has it's moments trying to write one of my results chapters (the longer one) and can't decide whether there's some stuff I should put in that chapter, in it's own seperate one or whether I shoudn't put it in at all

Hmm. do you need it for the later discussion?

Not really. It's more just experiments I've done over the years... Maybe I should ask my supervisor

Sounds sensible.

I'd say that there's no point outting it in your thesis unless it's needed in the argument. I've got lots of stuff that I didn't put in and I've just referred to it briefly in passing (kind of a one sentence 'I also did this but it's not being discussed in the thesis because...' type thing).

You won't be able to fit everything in...

I see what you mean

I'm worried about my as yet non-existing arguments in my thesis

Hmm. can you come up with 2-3 key things your thesis is about?

It's kind of two seperate projects.

1 - this happens but I don't know how it happens. It could be important
2- nothing happens. Why not?

1) what is it that happens? What are the possible explanations? Why might this be important?
2) what is the evidence that nothing happens? What are the possible explanations? What might be significant about this? Does this say anything about 1)?

Hmm, this is getting me thinking But I don't want to give away my entire work so I'll try and write in rather vague terms

1) So, this drug causes an increase in something. A variety of pathways are possible. Not all have been invesitgated properly due to constraints in the drugs available. So there are may other options available, some of which I've ruled out. It could have several effects on things happening in these cells, but it had no effect on the the one thing I investigated

2) my work showed there that there was no difference in treatment conditions. other studies have shown that there is a difference. There's a whole lot of reasons as to why I didn't see a difference though. Need to think about why this is significant I don't think it says much about 1)!

That's starting to sound like an argument.

Edit: have just realised, it's 1) that might say something about 2) - the other way round to how I put it before.

It is Thank you

Just need to find evidence to back it up with

I'm off for lunch now. back later.

Have fun

Thanks for your help

all in 1 chapter is the way to go apparently
That chapter is going to be huge. Just as well I'm only having two results chapters

I wouldn't worry. One of my discussion chapters was 17,500 words, and the other was over 16,500.

How long was your thesis in total?

291 pages.

*goes to do word count*

Eek that's long

94,809 words including footnotes (which do count for us) and tables (which don't count). I think there's probably 3,000-4,000 words worth of tables. Preliminaries, reference list and Appendixes don't count for us.

The maximum for us is 100,000 and most people in my area do 97,000+ but I didn't have enough words left to add another theme or chapter and didn't want to write extra words for the sake of it. I'm well above the MPhil limit which is 70,000 so can't be awarded an MPhil instead on the basis of length.


that's pretty much what my supervisor said. Her first reaction when she saw the soft bound copy was 'goodness that's thick' followed by 'that's a lovely colour you've chosen for the cover. It'll really relax the examiners when they look at it.'

I thought mine was a bit thin because we've got some old ones lying around in the office and most of those are 350-400 pages. But some are in Times New Roman and some look like they might be double-spaced, whereas I've done size 11 Arial and 1.5 spacing (apart from quotes and footnotes which are size 10 and single spaced).

Edit: don't forget that I'm social science. I think science theses tend to be shorter words-wise (although some end up longer in terms of pages if there's loads of graphs and maps and things).

Scientific discoveries pass through three distinct stages:



1 - It's not right

2 - It's right but not that important

3 - It's important but not new

What colour is it? Ours has to be green (soft bound and hard bound)

Our limit is 100,000 or 300 pages, but having seen other people's in the department and 200 pages is about the norm. Mine will be in Arial size, with 1.5 line spacing I have no idea about footnotes (have never used them).

No idea what the MPhil word limit is...




Well that makes me feel better

We can chose for our soft bound copy. Mine's a kind of cross between chalk blue and cobalt blue - sort of a slightly dusky version of this year's away tops.

Sounds good

I've just realised, it's almost the same colour as the reply buttons on here.