Wonderful news. Well done you!

I have 8 months to go, though my thesis is almost totally written. But I'm finishing off some more research to plug in to fill a gap, and have things to sort out. Plus I'm part-time, and seriously ill long-term, so only have a few good hours each week to work on this PhD.

I'm finding the last few months hard, especially as the pressure builds. This is despite me having a nearly completed thesis. I'm just trying to keep pushing myself (within my limits), remember my deadline, and keep going. It's very hard though - I'd really like to take an extended break!

I also find it helps not to think about the bigger picture so much as lots of smaller goals to work through. And to-do lists really help me keep cracking on.

Good luck!

I'd go with the examiner as well. Doesn't prevent you using the different form in any subsequent book or papers spun out from your thesis. But best to keep the examiner happy to get you that PhD first.

Good luck everyone who's in this situation. I was in the AHRC open competition 5 years ago (part-time student), so know what you're going through. Hope you get the results you're hoping for, and don't have to wait too long to find out.

Have you considered AHRC funding? They fund music PhDs, including apparently ones that fall under the remit "Music and Society", so not just performance. See http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/Eligibility.aspx

I think it's fair enough. I'm immunosuppressed so high risk for complications and am avoiding risk situations, just to be on the safe side. But in your circumstances I would do the same.

I'm just using basic maths but then I'm a humanities student! Seriously though I agree with Sue2604 that this is something your supervisor would be the best person to advise you on. Especially because they're going to be involved with picking examiners, and should know what sort of things any examiners would be looking out for.

If it's a thesis the chapter is for then permission isn't so important AFAIK i.e. you can reproduce copyright material for fair use. But if it's for a book or a paper the rules are more stringent.

Personally if it's for your thesis I'd say you've tried to contact them, to be fair, but if the organisation no longer exists and you can't trace the person you can't do much more than that, so just use it as it stands.

But if it's for a paper or a book you can't use it.

I find proofreading myself difficult - hard to distance myself from my own writing. But one thing I have found helpful is to read the pages backwards i.e. start at the last page, and then the page before that, and so on. It breaks up the flow a bit, but lets me focus on each page in sequence. Helps me see it afresh properly.

Good luck!

I've virtually finished - all chapters written and just finishing off a teeny bit of research before plugging in the results - so can speak from that perspective. I found it hard to keep going with the thesis writing but that was the key. That and breaking things down into smaller manageable chunks. I didn't worry about the "big story" until near the end of the writing when my supervisor helped me figure out where everything fitted in and how to tackle the overall conclusions. Up until then I just kept going, a chapter at a time (well actually 2 chapters at a time but you get the drift!), and using to-do lists to break things down and pick off the most appealing, or - more usually - least unappealing tasks to be getting on with!

Good luck.

What's your discipline? Dunleavy has some things to say about chapter numbers and lengths in his book about writing a PhD thesis, though he seems to be leaning more towards the humanities and social sciences side of things. For a 80,000 word thesis he recommends 8 chapters about 10,000 words each. Much longer than that becomes hard for you to structure effectively, and hard for the readers to read.