Thanks Sue! I put in more time early yesterday morning, and got to the point of having a PDF of a nearly finished thesis to email to my supervisor to study over the next few weeks. Still have to finish the bibliography, write the abstract, and tidy a few things here and there. But it's looking nearly finished. Which is rather exciting. Had a small bottle of champagne last night to celebrate :)

It's an incredibly specific topic: you've probably stunned us into silence!

Seriously though, if you're doing an aerospace degree you should have local contacts at your university who could start pointing you in the right direction, towards potential supervisors. You'd probably need a supervisor from the aviation side, and another from the medical side.

University staff should also be able to advise you on the chances of getting funding, and where to look.

Good luck!

Have you contacted the careers service at your university? They should be able to give you good advice, based on your personal circumstances, and the job market in the area you're looking at.

And that's me checking out. All captions renumbered (it worked this time - yahoo!), margins set to my university's specifications (despite Word's attempts to foil that maneuvre), title/contents/acknowledgements/declarations/abstract/appendix pages set up, and bibliography added into the main text. Ooh it looks nearly finished! How exciting.

Checking in for a bit of nocturnal work now (it's 1.50am - sheesh!). Want to have another go at persuading Word to do what it's supposed to do, making my life easier. If that fails there's a fair bit of manual editing required.

I don't have any experience of this, but my one concern is that if you did want an academic job in future, and turn your thesis into a book or papers (as many new post-docs do), it might be harder to do this if you've put them freely available on a website.

Then again it sounds like a nice idea. I have a personal website myself and when I finish (all going well) it might be nice to add a description of my research there (humanities as well), plus details of papers etc. But personally I wouldn't put downloadable material that is either under copyright already (journal papers), or I might conceivably want to do something with in the future (full thesis). Ditto for not putting online the large databases I've been building, but I could put descriptions of them up.

I've recently registered with dropbox.com - a secure file backup and file sharing site - and use this to backup my thesis files very frequently, and to share the latest versions of my thesis files between my various computers. I'm still sending copies to myself at the uni, and using an external backup drive. But dropbox has made it easier for me to work with my files on my various computers. I wish I'd found it earlier. It's ironic it makes such a difference to me right at the end of my PhD!

Ooh lots more posts. In particular nice to hear from PinkNeuron. Good luck with the last stages. I've found the last few months to be some of the "wobbliest" throughout my PhD, so can relate to you about that one.

Thanks Teek for the kind words. I'd be saying no to the supervisor now about extra work myself. But then that's me! Good luck with the last months of your PhD.

And nice to hear from Sue2604. It does sound as though you're quite a way through the writing-up already, with so many chapters done, to varying degrees. So that's encouraging.

Good luck to all the night train people tonight. I'm tucked up in bed and going to sleep shortly. Did a little PhD stuff earlier (figuring out what's left to sort out in my thesis), but am leaving more PhD stuff until tomorrow. Nice to see you lot have each other for company though tonight. Hope it's a productive one.

Good luck Wal. Poor you re still doing the data collection. I was lucky to be able to start writing up early on, which is just as well given how few hours a week I have for the part-time PhD. If I won the lottery I'd still want to finish my PhD though: it means too much to me, and is something money can't buy (well not a proper PhD anyway!).

Good luck for the last 7 months. I have less than 4 months left to my registration deadline now. I lost a whole month in August due to recovering from swine flu which sent me into a major panic. But picked things up, got on with it, and inching towards the end now.

And here we are into another month, rolling towards my absolute submission deadline of end of March 2010. I had a slight flutter as the month turned over earlier this week, but this is the first new month for a while that I haven't had a big panic. So that's progress! I'm still plodding away slowly, on about 5 hours total for the PhD a week. Working on finishing off - almost - the thesis redrafting. Hoping to have a big PDF to email my supervisor in a week or so. Expect him still to have some issues with it, but it's getting to the point where we're going to have to agree to compromise on certain things.

How's anyone else getting on who's aiming to submit around then. Do you think you will make it? Is your deadline flexible if not (mine isn't: I'm coming to the end of the 6 years registration period allowed for part-timers at my uni), or would you need to negotiate an extension? I could easily arrange an extension on medical grounds (lost so much time over the years due to long-term illness), but want to get it out of the way now. Confident of getting there.

I woudn't personally circulate anything pre-publication beyond my supervisor and immediate contacts. Certainly not to someone I don't know.

Ok that's me signing off again. Nasty pile now reduced from 24 to 14 pages, and I've earmarked the next 4 I'm going to tackle. Good progress.

Night all.