Only if you fail to do the corrections satisfactorily (i.e. per the examiner's requirements) within that time-frame. But if something came up that delayed you, for good reason, I expect you could easily get an extension if need be.

Basically it's a contract. They will give you a PhD (and guarantee to do so) if you do the corrections properly within the specified time-frame.

It is a very good result. Have a little short break, then bash on with your corrections. You should also get a detailed report from the examiners specifying what they want you to do. Follow this to the letter.

Congratulations!

My humanities (history) PhD had the refs in the footnotes. I don't see the problem 8-)

For example:

It has been established that penguins like the sunshine.1

where 1 is a footnote:

1 P. Bear, T. Womble, "Penguins and sunshine: a research study", _Journal of Snow Studies_, Vol. 6 (2005), pp. 23-28.

======= Date Modified 30 Jul 2011 22:10:10 =======
Do you want the PhD? If so get on with the corrections. You won't get it unless you do this. And since you're facing a resubmission - not just corrections - make sure you do them to the very very last specification from your examiners.

I am assuming you have received the examiners' report detailing what has to be done. That is essential if you are to do the corrections properly.

I'm afraid I have little sympathy with the feeling alone feeling. I was virtually on my own throughout my 6-year part-time PhD, being mostly housebound due to severely disabling neurological disease. And I managed. It's perfectly possible to manage.

But you need to get on with that resubmission ASAP. And I would have thought - based on what you said - it should be possible to finish it long before Christmas if you are not working.

Oh and draw up a list of what needs to be done. Break it down into sub-tasks. Then pick them off, one at a time, in order of most appealing or least unappealing.

Excellent! Congratulations ;-)

Oh that's fantastic news. Delighted for you 8-)

I'm not watching the news at the moment. I don't read newspapers. I really don't need to get upset about things. My neurological disease worsens with stress, so I try to stay a happy bunny.

I'm not sure things are that much worse than normal at the moment though, apart from the phone hacking scandal which has plumbed new depths, even for the tabloid press.

======= Date Modified 28 Jul 2011 15:29:00 =======
My abstract was 1 page double-line-spaced, about 300 words long.

======= Date Modified 28 Jul 2011 15:25:25 =======
Belatedly replying to earlier posts in this. Dunleavy in his "Authoring a PhD" book recommends that chapters come in at around 10,000 words, for readability reasons if nothing else. Much much longer than this and they are too unwieldy for examiners to read. Much much shorter and they are probably lacking on content.

My thesis was 70,000 words long, in 7 chapters, averaging at 10,000 words each. But there was huge variation between the chapters. Possibly my shortest was my intro / literature review, which was about 6,500 words long. Another chapter was about 14,000 words long. The chapters were as long as they needed to be. But they still averaged at around Dunleavy's figure, not by design, but purely by chance.

I was a humanities (history) student.

I think a supervisor should only be down as a co-author if they have contributed to the research described in a significant way. My journal articles during my PhD were written totally by me, on research I did with virtually no input from my supervisor, not even discussion about it as it was ongoing. In sciences it's a formality to have a supervisor as a co-author even in those circumstances. Personally I think that's daft.

My supervisor has published research where I've been employed as a research assistant doing all the legwork in the historical archives. But I'm not a co-author there, and wouldn't expect to be, even though that's a stronger case than him being co-author on mine. He did all the analysis for those papers, so he's the author. I like that system.

Yes in humanities it is not normal for supervisors to be co-authors. I had 2 journal papers published during my part-time PhD (history), both sole-authored by me. And now I'm publishing more as a post-doc, and they're still sole-authored.

At my university a supervisor has to sign off the thesis before submission. I don't think we can submit without a supervisor doing that. You need to check the rules at your university.

The reason why I left DropBox - and I was a paying user of it, using a lot of Gigabytes - is not because of their security failure, but because of a slightly later change of terms of use. Basically they changed their terms of use to claim all intellectual rights to data stored in DropBox, including publishing that material and translating it. This change seems to have been a mistake on their part. What they were trying to do was to claim enough rights to be able to provide their service, but they overdid things on the rights they claimed. But it was enough to seriously freak out a lot of people who rely on their creative content for financial or academic reasons: such as freelance writers and artists, and academics like me - I'm a post-doc producing new journal papers, which I had been storing in DropBox until that point.

As I said DropBox did change their terms of use back to something more suitable. But it was too late for a lot of users, whose trust had been lost, and have moved to other backup solutions.

I looked at quite a lot of the options available. I chose SpiderOak because it is totally encrypted, and even the SpiderOak people can't decrypt the data at their end. And they gave me a silly number of free Gigabytes :p

I use MS Word and MS Excel, but once I have upgraded my Mac to Lion I plan to switch to Pages and Numbers (Apple's own office programs).

I use EndNote for keeping track of literature/publications.

I use the LiveJournal blogging site to manage my to-do lists, so I can update them and see them anywhere on the move. I find this better than using pen and paper (far less losable).

I use the Prolog language to manage task-management, using a project/task management simple system I programmed myself.

And I use the free MySQL database system to build and query large-scale databases for my research. Access doesn't run on my Mac (unless under Windows emulation), and I am much happier using MySQL and writing the database queries in the SQL programming language (legacy of my first degree in computer science).

I used to use DropBox to share my files between computers and do online backups. However their recent change of terms of use terrified me (even if they were subsequently edited), and I have switched to SpiderOak, who also gave me more free Gigabytes, thanks to referrals.

======= Date Modified 25 Jul 2011 16:47:20 =======
Based on the experience of my fellow PhD humanities graduates in my department who have gone onto full-time academic posts, I think a publication record is really important. You can start addressing this now, writing journal papers based on your PhD and submitting them to academic journals. But it will take some time before they are published, even assuming they are accepted. The process of publication in humanities journals is not a speedy one, so you should start tackling this ASAP.

I can't work due to my progressive neurological disease, but I am spending 12 months turning my thesis into more journal papers (I had 2 published during my part-time PhD). I generally work on papers in pairs, so submitted 2 some months ago, then wrote 2 more, while developing 2 more in the early stages. I currently have 2 papers recently accepted, but expect publication could be over a year from now. 2 more of my papers are currently submitted with editors/reviewers, and I am writing 2 more papers at the moment.

Research heavy jobs often include some element of teaching, even small, so I think teaching experience would be beneficial for getting such a job rather than detrimental.

My husband is a research fellow. He does a tiny amount of teaching. But his lack of teaching experience is a block to him moving onto a lectureship. But he's happy with his research.