I am incredibly pushy with my supervisors and have been telling them about the dates for a long time so that they have taken that into account in scheduling.

Very true... your internal and external are not meant to be your friends or anyone who has come into direct contact with you professionally.

Very fishy university

Congratulations sylvester. In a way I am quite envious. I am finishing and you are starting. The first year is the best and the most exciting.

Thought I should contribute to this thread with my happy news... After my mock viva, talked with my supervisor who sent me an email saying that he thought I was ready to face the world and defend my thesis!!!

Praying for her to pass indeed! Hope her examiners see her for the bone lazy talentless thing she is!

How many chapters do your thesis have? Of course this is directed to finishing up members. Mine is 7 chapters long.

Germany... mind you my best friend is from Dusseldorf and she is the sweetest thing but she was here for ten years getting her qualifications so.

However the examiner was German and very typically so. Though the lack of humour thing is probably just her as opposed to anything else. I am sure there are many happy, fun, dis-organised, relaxed Germans in the world.

She owes you money and she has been nasty to you... Gosh this is begining to sound like you are lying down and making it easy for her to be mean to you.

Seriously start getting mean! Show her your teeth

Sigh, I wish I could stop this madness!

I go in at whatever time (normally 12PM) and come out anytime (normally 7PM). Sometimes I go earlier if I feel like going for lunch with the group or if I have scheduled experiments to conduct. My group is laid back about actual hours, and allows working from home. Yet we complete work and are very productive.

Most of my best work (writing-wise) is done at home. And luckily a lot of my work can be done on a computer/laptop and transfered to the lab during experiments.

It should be more about the quality of what you produce as opposed to the time you take to produce it. Unfortunately some old-fashioned supervisors do tend to expect you to be there 9-5 in order to be able to do work. I am not a morning person so whatever I do in the morning would be nonsense.

Had my mock viva yesterday. Firstly the mock examiner hadn't read the thesis so was only able to comment on high level issues and part of the analysis. So the mock viva was not very representative of the actual thing. Quite useless and not worth the preparation I put in.

Secondly I made a jocular comment that the only reason I did an ethics procedure was because my supervisor insisted on it. And even though I said I was kidding and answered the question, the examiner said that the statement was a sign of an immature researcher!

So I guess once I become a researcher, I will have to loose my sense of humour! Then again, the examiner was from the part of Europe famed for it's lack of humour so maybe it is just a culture clash!

Well Ann, you will find that the day is already in your calendar this year. It is on the first day of summer!

I have just submitted my first draft. waiting for my mock viva in 15 minutes.

I took just over two months to write mine but that was because I spent time writing a state of the art paper (it got accepted) for two months before that and it then turned into my literature review chapter.

I think the literature review is the biggest job in the thesis. After that perhaps your methodology chapter is the next big job. Then it is just you justifying your work. If you did the work and know your research inside out then the writing should follow painlessly.

You just have to stay motivated and continue writing even when you get bad comments on it.

my final viva date has also been sorted out...

I did the cleaning thing yesterday with a toothbrush and Mr. Muscle.

Eeek