I do moan at times, I do struggle with long-term ill health. But I love my PhD and expect to miss it a lot when I finish!

Good luck in getting on with the writing. I'd personally take the weekend off though. You mustn't burn yourself out. And you mustn't put yourself under too much pressure. It's got to be a sustainable pace to take you through to the end.

A chapter every 1-2 weeks sounds tough. Do also allow time for your supervisor to read and get back. One of mine was very slow at reading stuff.

I'm sitting up, doing some databasing. Have finished the dratted spreadsheet preparation and now have a new relational database. Just running a couple of SQL queries to pull out the answers I need for the last bit of writing up. I think that part of things will be fast. It's just the preparation has taken months (eek!).

I'm also planning on cracking on with my final rewrites, although I'll probably leave that to sometime tomorrow. Have feedback on half of the full thesis draft now, but need another meeting next month to go through the rest. Lots of small changes which are easy, and larger ones not so easy. But bashing on.

Good luck everyone.

My understanding is that it is hard. I was the first student ever on my Masters course to get a distinction.

But if you're getting around 68% you're not far off. Perhaps you'll find the dissertation easier to write than you expect? I think I was lucky that I picked a great topic for me and really got into it.

Good luck.

Didn't check in earlier but have just finished a couple of hours doing more spreadsheeting work. Almost ready to load the data into my newest database and run the necessary queries. Going to do that over the next few days, along with getting on with last phase chapter rewrites. But signing off now.

Feeling more positive now. Have made progress with my database building in the last few days, so hope to finish off my final piece of plug-in research, analysis and writeup in the next couple of weeks (been at it since June). And today I got a summary of my supervisor's feedback about final rewrites/changes to be made to my thesis. Meeting tomorrow to discuss things properly, but much perkier. And matriculated again too. Better be for the last time!

I'd go for the dream if I was you. Keep the librarianship as a backup option for the future - if after the PhD things don't work out job-wise you could always do a postgraduate course in librarianship. But definitely consider going for the dream. The risk if you don't is that you might regret things down the line.

I changed discipline too. My Masters history degree was rather different from my PhD history topic. So much so that it gave me virtually no grounding in it! But it hasn't been a problem, either at admission or since.

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Thanks Flutterflutter for the kind words. Much appreciated.

I'm really curious about your topic though. Religion and gardening sections? What could you be writing about?!

I have a sort of similar problem with my research. What I'm investigating is only rarely recorded in the historical evidence. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, and then trying to make sense of things. I do not have an abundance of research material to work with. It's meant that my thesis has ended up a bit shorter than I'd like, but I've been told that's ok.

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Good luck Alpacalover and Lara and anyone else out there tonight. I'm joining in too. Didn't do anything useful yesterday because it was my birthday :p so would like to do a bit tonight. I had a bureaucratic nightmare matriculating on Monday so am even more determined than ever to finish before my 6 year part-time deadline in March. Have a meeting with supervisor later this week to discuss final alterations to the thesis. In the meantime it's more spreadsheeting for me. This is my most productive time of day.

A short holiday will do you good, but I'd also recommend that you consider speaking to a counsellor at your university. They're there to help students (including postgrads) through tough emotional patches. They don't come up with suggestions or solutions, but help you cope with the situation better. So maybe you could set that up alongside the break. I'm sure it will also help to see your supervisor again. Depending on how comfortable you feel about this you could also drop the supervisor a short email to let them know how things are going. I've sent my supervisors panic emails in the past. It's not a bad thing to do, they can offer words of wisdom before they can meet me in person, and it gets it out of my system!

Enjoy your 3 weeks away!