You don't have your PhD until any corrections are approved and signed off.

And, strictly speaking, you don't have it until it's conferred by Senate.

So i f submitting before Christmas you can't put that as the year you got your PhD. It would be the next one, all going well.

Though you can put in a CV that you submitted on a particular date.

Ooh actually I did get a letter from Senate confirming the degree had been awarded. So I had a bit of paper, even while waiting for graduation and the degree certificate.

It was the first thing I ever got addressed to me as Dr :)

At my university research degrees are conferred by the Senate, which meets every couple of months. So it was very soon afterwards that I was officially a Dr.

Graduation happened a little later, but that's really a formality with UK PhD degrees.

You should ask the authorities at your university what the procedure is. For example if you are waiting for graduation (when you will have the degree certificate in your hand, or posted to you) then is there a winter ceremony at your university, or will you have to wait for the summer, etc.

But, again, graduation really is a formality for UK PhD degrees. So once it's conferred by the university, and all tidied up, you are definitely officially a Dr :) Even if you might still be waiting for that bit of paper to prove it ...

You should take a corrected version of the page including diagram and text as they should be, in printed form, into your viva - with enough copies to show each of the examiners. Having it on a USB stick is no good. They're not going to load it up from there. But you need to show them the fix you will make, on paper.

Don't worry though. It's a really minor thing that can be easily fixed. And your examiners won't worry about it.

I'm a republican, but I'm actually quite happy about this royal wedding for once, because I met my husband at St Andrews University, as undergraduates, so I can relate to this pair more than usual.

The news made me smile. Which was rather a surprise.

Well done! Delighted for you :)

Yes it's a book by Jackson & Tinkler: "The Doctoral Examination Process: A Handbook for Students, Examiners and Supervisors".

I would prepare yourself for a brief overview of your thesis. Also a very likely ice-breaker question is why did you choose this topic. I was asked this at the very start, and I've heard of other people being too.

I took a 1-page printout (large font) of my answers to the 5 key questions. I had it sitting in front of me during the viva, on top of my thesis. But I didn't need to refer to it. The examiners were unaware of it AFAIK. I would think it's ok to take cards in.

And my examiners did NOT go through my thesis page by page. They discussed higher-level issues. At the very end where we were discussing the minor corrections they referred me to specific pages, but that was just a couple of things, and they did not do that earlier.

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I was a history student, so humanities too, but a little different.

According to Jackson & Tinkler humanities vivas tend to be between 1 and 2 hours long. Mine was just an hour, but that was partly due to disability factors, keeping it short so I could manage.

I would ask your supervisor if you should prepare a PowerPoint presentation. I've heard of humanities people being asked to give an informal few-minutes run-through of their research and thesis, but never so formal as to have slides etc.

Examiners will focus on your thesis, so if it's more theoretical they'll go for that more, if it's more to do with analysis they will go for that. They will ask you why you decided to do certain things certain ways, why you reached such a conclusion, how your research relates to others etc.

If you're very lucky they'll tell you the result at the start of the viva. That happened to me. More likely though you'll have to stew it, and wait until the end to find out how you've got on. They do mainly decide on the basis of the thesis, but in a borderline case the viva can swing things.

As for preparation, my viva preparation involved reading a viva preparation book (Tinkler and Jackson) to demystify the process, rereading and summarising my thesis to familiarise myself with it and spot typos (I took a list into the viva on the day and handed it out - all examiners/convenor were very grateful), and thinking about and memorising my answers to 5 key questions: originality of my thesis, contribution to knowledge, methodology, weaknesses/gaps/mistakes, and what would I do differently if starting again.

And, yes, do take a bottle of water in with you! It helps if you get a dry mouth, and it can also be quite distracting to glug from while formulating your answers to questions ;-) Oh and your thesis as well of course.

I would ask questions in the interview. It shows that you are really interested, have some specific questions, and it will get the answers you need sooner rather than later.

Good luck. I worked half-time as an RA in 2003-2004 overlapping the end of my Masters and start of PhD. And it worked out very well. I worked as an RA Monday all day, Wednesday afternoon, and Friday all day. The other days (i.e. Tuesday and Thursday) I needed to recuperate cos of the neurological disease. But my boss was happy to let me pick my preferred days.

Is school teaching a good option at the moment though? In Scotland anyway something like only 10% of newly qualified teachers are getting school positions. I don't know what the figures for the rest of the UK are. And even locum work isn't a good alternative, because there are so many unemployed teachers seeking the few opportunities.

Don't want to dissuade you, but check out the statistics before leaping towards this specific career.

I left a full-time PhD 14 years ago, so I've been there, done that. It's not an easy choice. But once you make it, if it's the right choice, it can be as though a weight has lifted off your shoulder.

It possible for structure to evolve in the process of writing, i.e. as a result of writing. This is where you don't know exactly where your story is leading, but you start on the journey, do the writing, and see what you come up with. If you do this you need to do a major re-editing/drafting afterwards i.e. your first draft is just a very first draft, and will need restructuring big style. But it can be done. That's what I did throughout my humanities thesis. I could rarely predict in advance what my structure would be, and preferred to write and see what emerged.

Go and see your supervisor. Explain where you have got to and ask for help about how to tackle structuring what you already have. You will not need to start the writing from scratch, so have already made good progress.

Worrying about looking at the thesis is probably worse than you will feel when you actually start doing it. So start that tomorrow. Start small. Read your acknowledgements and intro chapter. That's it :) And then see how you feel.

I used it for my 6-year part-time PhD, but I just used it as a database of things I'd read. I couldn't get "cite while you write" to work with my ancient version of Mac Word, and as a humanities student with an unusual referencing style I preferred to do my references manually. But it was superb at remembering things I'd read, and most useful when I (manually) produced my final bibliography.

I'd doubt that you can talk your way out of having to re-include some text in your thesis. Your thesis stands alone, and that's the ultimate thing you have to defend. It's not enough for you to have other knowledge in your head. So be prepared that you may need to re-include that text.

As for viva preparation, I took a very different route from Lara. Answering many dozens of potential questions would do me no good because I couldn't remember the answers in the viva (due to brain damage), and most of them wouldn't come up anyway. I actually found it very difficult to predict what questions my examiners would ask me.

So, instead, I concentrated my thinking on 5 core questions, the most essential ones that between them cover a lot of the rest: originality of my thesis, contribution to knowledge, methodology, weaknesses/gaps/mistakes, and what would I do differently if starting again.

My other viva preparation involved reading a viva preparation book (Tinkler and Jackson) to demystify the process, and rereading and summarising my thesis to familiarise myself with it and spot typos (I took a list into the viva on the day and handed it out at the start).

I have a Kindle - bought it a couple of months ago. It's transformed my leisure reading, though I wouldn't really want to read PDFs on it. It has a small screen, though you can turn it 90 degree to get a wider view. PDFs can also be converted to native Kindle format, which can make them easier to read, with larger text, but sometimes the conversion results can be quite messy, depending on how heavily typeset the original PDF is.

But it has transformed my reading. I've been increasingly struggling with print books for disability reasons, and getting it has made a big difference to me.