Got my viva date just now. End of March. Eek. Wibble. At least come April the viva will be over.

Fortunately I finished rereading my thesis the other day. I just have to think about the "big" questions that might come up. Should be fine. Fingers crossed!

I'm part-time, and not based on campus, so basically I've very little to do with the other students! This isn't of my choosing. A few years ago when I was stronger health-wise I used to make it in to research seminars, and was on chatting terms with a lot of the then PhD-ers. But they've moved on now (I'm part-time so have been a PhD student for a *long* time!), and I don't know the current batch. We have an electronic bulletin board system, but virtually no-one uses it.

www.jobs.ac.uk?

My BA(Hons) was a 2.1 too. I started a humanities taught Masters. I got a distinction in the end, which made my undergraduate degree pretty irrelevant. To be honest I think a good pass in a Masters pretty much does that, as long as your undergraduate degree wasn't appalling. And I started a PhD, and applied in my first year for AHRC funding for the rest, and got it. So it's doable.

Dropbox is ample to backup my main thesis files, which is what I used it for. I have 3GB free: the 2GB to start with, then extra 250MB chunks for referring another person to Dropbox, installing on a second computer, etc. Even with lots of stuff in there I've still only used 10% of my allowed free space.

Good luck! There's at least one other part-time student on this board who is studying part-time in a similar arrangement in a teaching/lecturing situation, but I'm not sure if she has children, so relies on the summer to catch up with PhD time.

I got through my PhD on typically just 5 hours a week, so it is possible to manage on very few hours (I recently submitted). But if you can take some regular time during the 9-5 Mon-Fri working week for it, do. Otherwise you'll be constantly burning the candle at both ends, and as you say your family time is very important.

Ok but if those goals required for your employment, not your PhD, then take it out of your employment time, not the time you set aside for working on the PhD.

I just rechecked my literature review to see how long it was: 11,000 words + 4,000 footnotes. In case that helps. It also included some methodology and plans for the rest of the PhD.

I'm part-time. I wrote my literature review within 3 months of starting. And I kept writing after that. Writing early will help you a lot later on. Quite frankly it's more important than other stuff like conferences and journal articles.

Glad to help. I'm ok thanks. Still don't have a viva date, but have been getting lots of advice about the viva from staff/students. And preparing by (very slowly!) rereading and summarising my thesis.

I have a lot of references in my bibliography that start "Anonymous" because that's what the author was. Then I follow it with title, and so on.

USB sticks can fail, so make sure you backup regularly by other ways.

When I was finishing off my thesis I used Dropbox to backup and synchronise my files between computers, as well as sending copies to my husband at the university, and emailing myself regular updates. Oh and backing up my laptop to a firewire portable drive every few weeks. I got rather paranoid about how many times I backed up, but I didn't dare lose the data!

I'm history (social/cultural history).

Used to be a computer science PhD student as well, but that was a lifetime ago ;-)

Well done Angelofthenorth! I've been working away over the last hour, working through more of my thesis, reading and summarising it as part of my viva preparation. Can only do so much before I need to take a break, but managed to get to page 100 just now, which is a *good thing* 8-)