That's good advice, Iseult, thanks for sharing. I agree that it is very easy to get bogged down by detail too early, spending huge amounts of time on things that might not even be relevant to the bigger picture.

I would have very clearly asked for help when I first realised I was getting nowhere. Currently in my fourth year of getting nowhere, and it's getting old.

Ah, yes! Good point. I wish I would have utilized all of the resources and help available to me a lot sooner.

I hope you will soon start to feel like you're making progress.

Read a thesis or 10 in my first year (sup banned it so spent a long time wondering what I was supposed to be producing)

Decided on a clear strategy about when to publish - I faffed around for a year wanting to publish, going back and forth writing chapters/papers/chapters/papers and then not publishing in the end and leaving it all in a pile for afterwards - if I'd just got on with the chapters I'd have saved a lot of time.

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Learn't how to write in 'thesis style' or ask what style was expected. This would have saved me months of work during write-up. More attention as to how other theses were written would have helped here, especially my predecessors'.

Also set a standard structure for analysis and characterisation of samples (magnification on SEM, temperatures to sample at, etc.) as this probably have saved me another month and a half I used up to gain production quality graphics.

The main problem I had was me and my primary supervisor having different ideas on how the project was going to pan out. That said, he was a good supervisor and I managed to work the key bits he wanted into my thesis quite comfortably.

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)