Thanks.
Mine is currently a big multi-stage analysis chapter to be followed by a big discussion one which is based on some of the outcomes of the analysis. Supervisor is keen on including a chapter on findings between the two as well.
I'm not sure how to avoid repeating things a lot.

A question for those who are or have written long (80,000) thesis in humanities or other qualitative research.

How did you structure this section? I've read advice on having them separate but following a detailed analysis section does the findings risk being a sliver between that and the discussion? Obviously every thesis is different which makes finding good advice a bit hit and miss sometimes.

What general discipline is it in? I'm more or less humanities and for me my originality came from who and what I was researching not how so that my research methods were somewhat 'off the shelf' with a bit of adaptation for context hasn't been any trouble at all.

I have no idea if sciences or engineering or anything like that might require more novelty in discovering new methods or not.

I've not experienced any nastiness in my academic life and can only think of two people I know who have experienced difficulties that they have related to friends (and one of those was an admin issue where no students were paid for their teaching until January despite teaching a significant proportion of a bachelors degree between them).

That isn't to say that there haven't been some 'robust' or 'frank' moments when kicks up the arse have been delivered. If I've experienced difficulty its in the relentlessness that can come, there is always something due, rather than proper hostility.

My funding conditions tied me to kerping full time office hours and stipulated that I take no other work. So for me it's been all PhD, papers and conferences.

It's very much a heating on with windows open affair

It's good to know I'm not alone. I feel like if I stop for too long I might never come back to it so rest is out of the question these days.

The main advice from whoever I speak to on campus tends to be 'just get it done' which probably makes all the sense in the world when you're not the one sinking in it.

I did mind in (recent) political history and found the modules ok, but that I had to invest a lot of time into reading before writing. As an undergrad it probably isn't advisable but its certainly doable to read and write at the same time so things can come together quite quickly.

My biggest challenge was time management as I was self-funding so worked 25+ hours in a regular job with my shifts juggled about to fit my university timetable.

The modules were pretty much equally difficult the whole way through, so your marks should improve as you learn how to cope and get a sense of what it is the lecturers want from you.

I think I only got a distinction in one module and merits in the others. I've found that once the degree was finished the fact that I have a masters is what matters, its less dependent on the type of award you receive than a bachelors is.

I'm in the late-ish stages of my writing up period (actually inside an extension) and I'm really suffering. I don't know if its exhaustion - work 6 or 7 days most weeks, haven't had 2 days together since August bank holiday and longer that probably since new years - but I feel like I've got no more words to give and a word count almost 30,000 short. That sounds like a lot but with 50,000 under my belt and only one chapter which still needs writing from scratch (the others are all at least half done and everything is planned) I feel like all I need is one big push and it'll be over by Christmas.

That said my supervisor is trying to keep me on a very tight schedule. Weekly check ups and deadlines. I've always tended to write with momentum, even now my best writing comes in bursts rather than a steady flow. These two approaches don't gel very well at all which means fortnightly b*****kings and a constant atmosphere of dread and failure. I'm sure much of it imagined on my part but it can take some time to get back into doing things properly when each meeting expends so much mental energy in anticipation and worry.

Basically, advice, tips, reassurances, anyone?

I'm not sure whether I've just got writing up blues or whether academia has burnt me out before I've even reached the end of my PhD but I'm very much in the 'is academia for me?' boat at the moment.

I'd love to be able to do some post-doc work and expand on what I've done so far but as I progress (see: struggle) with writing up I'm beginning to have doubts in whether I can do it. The intellectual content of my work is well received and unless I greatly offend someone in the department over the next few months I should be able to count on their support to back bids for post-doc funding but writing has always been a struggle and its getting worse. Ultimately I don't want to lecture but feel that in the short-to-medium term research is what I'd like to give myself a good grounding in as I enjoy and I'm interested in that aspect.

Caught in two though - is my interest and motivation strong enough to power through how miserable the negatives make me? And if I leave is that the door shut behind me for good?

Open plan office seating 40 from three different disciplines
Why get out of your seat to talk to someone quietly when you can keep your eyes on your monitor and just shout over your shoulder, right?

I had a 2.2 from my bachelors, worked for a few years was able to self fund and masters before my PhD was fully funded. I had worked for five years in a profession related to my PhD before applying.

It might be possible to get funding if you have a decent reason for your third and can demonstrate that you're now capable of doing whatever it is you are applying to do but I'd imagine you'll have to really work hard to justify getting it. Even self-funding I had to submit a 2000 word personal statement and I think be interviewed alongside the standard application form (at a Russell Group university).

I'm due to submit my thesis over the winter and finding writing incredibly difficult but while the the deadlines imposed on my research week is extremely stressful - my institution is very strict on timely submission and to even get a couple of months writing up on top of my initial three years was difficult - one of my main concerns at the moment is money.

I was fully funded to do my PhD, with a condition that I couldn't take extra work outside my research, and now I'm into an extension period things are getting tight. My last funding payment was during the summer - in the expectation of submitting in September. As per my previous funding conditions I've not done any teaching during my PhD and now my supervisors have me turning down an opportunity to do a couple of guest lecture spots for other professors in my department to concentrate on completing my thesis.

Even if I completed to my original timetable I'd have had my money expire months before my viva. How have other people on here found the late-PhD/post-submission period when funding is drying up?

Would trying to take guest spots helping host seminars and lectures without any experience be more disruptive that beneficial while I'm prepping journal papers and thinking about my viva? Should I just try and get some data entry temp job to plug the gap once I can spare the time?

I'm busy planning a research project regarding the online use of and behaviour towards information and data sources by the public. As part of this I want to monitor and analyse the way people use information (statistics etc) in conversations online and while robert kozinets in his book on netnography recommends manually doing this through screengrabs and text dumps of the discussions being studied I was wondering if there are any programmes that anyone on here knows of which will automatically retrieve the text from the sites I am studying?

Obviously this would be population whose permission has been asked beforehand and the automated data collection would be to allow the researcher to concentrate on more analysis rather than collection.

Ideally something prepackaged with the minimum coding experience needed would be ideal as I'm a social/information scientist not a computer programming type.