Usually requirements are 2.1 or a masters, so you should be fine.

Have attempted to job seek outside of academia, my take on it is that a PhD isn't worth a damn when it comes to "experience". Employers couldn't have cared less about those so-called transferable skills from my PhD. The reason I was getting interviews was based on job skills from 5 years ago. Every time I gave an example of something from my PhD in an interview, they were dismissive and asked for a work example. And to be fair, my work examples are far superior than anything my PhD could offer.

I think as PhD students, we are led to believe we are fantastic and there's so much opportunity out there for us. I don't believe this to be true. Employers either don't understand the true nature of a PhD ("it's just another degree") or don't value the skills it confers. I think it's a hindrance to getting many jobs outside of academia.

This is one of the main reasons I want to stick in academia: at least someone values my ability and wants to pay me well for it.

Agree with everything pm133 said... but there's still no job I would rather be doing :P

Yes, 12 hours a day is not sustainable for long. Many of us do it in our 4th years (and it's really, really hard) but you don't want to be doing it in your first year.

Why don't you send over the bits you've done and then ask for specific feedback? Highlight bits you're unsure about and ask them to focus on that. You're right, the closer you get to the deadline, the less likely they are to give you a lot of feedback because they know you won't have much more time to make the changes so there is no point.

That's allowed for a revise and resubmit. It's quite normal to have further corrections, you just need to make these.

I don't think you have a valid reason to change examiners at this stage.

I don't think it will make any difference how long you take. In the UK, people seem to be pretty understanding about people taking career breaks for kids etc so I don't see why it would be problem if you took longer to finish because you wanted a family life too.

You've already got experience in teaching, so that will help when finding a job afterwards. I don't think being funded or not helps in job applications. I've never heard anyone discuss this as a good or a bad thing (in biology, although most people are either funded by a research council, the university or are funded international students). Successfully applying for and getting your own funding obviously makes a difference, but I'm not talking about that.

https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/jul/28/not-all-phd-supervisors-are-natural-mentors-some-need-training

I agree with bewildered.

I think most people are a bit like you Tutor - I don't know anyone who has made notes throughout their PhD. Most people in my field keep detailed lab books of experiments, data on spreadsheets and then just keep a pile of paper (physical or online) with maybe a few notes or highlights on these.

My strategy was to read when designing experiments, to make sure I considered the parameters and controls carefully, and then read when writing up. This is how I have learnt to work. I agree though, I am still more familiar with a lot of my undergraduate stuff than I am with my PhD stuff, because I revised it for exams, but I've never done that with my PhD reading, so I'm not going to remember it in the same way. Now if I need something, I just search for it in my papers in Mendeley, so it doesn't really matter if I can remember it in detail or not. I don't think taking the same undergraduate approach would be helpful, because there is just so much more you need to know at PhD level, you can't possibly remember it all in detail.

I also agree with Pjlu though, anything I wrote about in my thesis I'm still very familiar with due to the countless revisions required as I was researching and writing it. And you definitely get to stage where you know the literature better that your supervisors do and can make better suggestions that they can.

Also see this for all fields, but US data for 2015:

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17306/static/report/nsf17306.pdf