Hi Satchi, sorry to hear you're having a tough time getting a job. Is a really disheartening time. Prior to getting my current job I think I applied for 11 posts, had 4 rejections outright and 7 rejections after interview. (I think what this says is I'm good at selling myself on paper and rubbish at selling myself in person!) The post I am currently in was the first I applied for (and was rejected after interview). The person who got it quit after almost a year. They contacted the original interviewees and encouraged us to apply, by which point only two were still looking for jobs and I got it.

Fingers crossed something will come up. It's a difficult time in the job market. My post ends early next year and I'm dreading being back on the job applications.

2. Yes there are lots of bad papers (or in fairness, not great papers!) We set up a jounral club that essentially consists of us ripping papers to pieces! It sometimes seems to me that if your sample size is big then you can get away with publishing any old rubbish! (or maybe I'm bitter becasue I'm struggling to get my small sample size papers accepted!)

I agree everyone hates their thesis after submission!

I think it depends what these revisions are, and what corrections you get.
I got pass with typos. They picked up about 15. I found close to 100! I was told I could only make changes to typos and not change anything else. There were quite a few places where I felt the use of grammer was clunky or I wanted to re write sections to make it clearer, but in the end had to leave things as they were.

Best of luck with the outcome :)

Sounds like a difficult decision. I can see why you would want to move, but also thing Bewildered makes a lot of sense. I can also see things from the POV of where I am now, I am working as a postdoc, and we have two PhD students who are rarely around and don't seem to want to have anything to do with being part of a research team. Certainly when I was writng up it was helpful to be around other people who were going through the same thing and people who I could bounce ideas off. A lot of an academic career is about networking, and collaborating with people and I don't really understand why people want to do it all on their own. But I guess it does depend what your situation is like, and whether there is much of a research group where you are. Also I don't want you to feel this is a criticism of you for wanting to move away, but something else for you to consider. Is there much of a research group there that you are part of, contribute to and gain from?

Other things that rang alarm bells as the lack of an office to work in if you moved home. Where would you then be working? would you be distracted? And the fact your studentship requires you to be there three days a week - you may not even be able to move away if that was upheld. My advice would be to discuss it with your supervisor they may be totally happy for you to move or they may have strong feelings that you shouldn't. Hopefully this would give you some guidance in your decision.

Re impact - I went on a course recently about things every post doc need to know. There was a session about 'impact' where we were told impact didn't mean public engagement, instead it meant showing that your research would lead to something else happening. This could be a change in policy, a change in diagnosis or treatment for a disease or a change in the way other people do research, for example if you came up with a new technique. I guess by this definition a lot of research doesn't really have much impact, but it's something funding bodies want to know about.

I had two supervisors and they each read each chapter only once. I made the required changes but never gave it to them again.

I do think it depends a bit on the student and the relationship with the supervisors. I felt happier giving them what I saw as completed drafts for each chaper (or as good as I thought I could make them) and then didn't really have a lot of comments for changes. One supervisor did pick up on some typos and made a few comments on structure, grammer, but the other only really commented on content.

I'm not sure I've known anyone where their supervisors looked at multiple drafts, certainly not many more than two.

I think there is a general tightening but it has been going on for a while. When I started (2007) our regulations stated we had a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 4. I handed in 4 years to the day! I have heard there is certain research funding that can only be obtained if the Uni (or maybe dept.) has 75% of PhD students completing in 4 years. I know I caused some panic as I was only at a small uni (well a medical school affiliated with a uni) and there were only 3 PhD students in my year. I was last to submit and had I not got it in within 4 years we would not have achieved the 75% completion rate.

I applied for PostDoc jobs before I had submitted. On my CV I put PhD 2007-present day and then on application form put that I intended to submit summer 2011. I got a few interviews on the basis of these applications, so guess this is pretty common and employers weren't put off by it.

If the job application siad they wanted people with a PhD you could give an informal enquiry to ask whether they would consider someone who was soon to submit.

Hi Ice,
Glad you're feeling better following the advice given. If you have good data it seems to be a case of getting your thoughts organised and getting it on paper. I look 4 years (to the day!) to submit my PhD and at the stage you're at (end of Jan year 4) I had completed zero chapters! It was hard work but I did manage to get my thesis written in that time.
Good luck with the writing.

Congratulations Dr Pineapple! I've followed your story, but not posted much of late. Am really pleased that it has been good news for you and hope that you manage to get the corrects done and out the way quickly. Good luck with the job hunt too.

Have a good weekend of celebration!

They're all in a couple of folders on my shelf, and haven't been looked at in the year since my viva. Am thinking of recycling the lot as I have most of them in electronic form anyway and can get hold of them again online.

Dilemma.

I have a friend (well more a friend of a friend) who does a lot of blogging. Her posts sometimes stray into the realm of psychology, which is was the subject of my undergraduate degree and area of PhD. Anyway I've notice a few times she has completely misrepresented (or misunderstood) psychological research, and used this to back up her arguments. Which kinda really grates when I know the studies she's using and they did not say what she claims they did.

Would you.

1) Say nothing.
2) Annonymously post a comment pointing out the error
3) Publically post a comment pointing out the error

So far I've gone for option one, especially as often it is a small part of the blog post that doesn't detract from the main argument. It's just annoying seeing reasech misused. Especially as bloggers tend to have a habit of simply saying 'research showed........' without a reference.

Mine was a Friday afternoon, scheduled for 3pm! First thing me examiners said was "let's try and get this finished before 5 as no one wants to be here late on a Friday!"
I wouldn't read too much into it, for me it was the only time my external and internal could both do.

We have a similar problem, except the hoarder of everything is the boss! Wouldnt be so bad if it was well stored but we have filing cabinets of data mixed with print outs of journal article from the 90s, mixed with financial stuff, drafts of papers and grant proposal and finally print outs of email conversations from 10 years ago! And then there's no room for current researchers to store anything.

Anyway personally I would find out why they're resistant to change. Is it that they don't want to take responsibility for the work of sorting? Or they're scared of losing something useful? Or they like the clutter? I wouldn't go ahead and sort without getting them on board as you open yourself up to blame if something important does go missing (even if you never touched/saw the missing item)

I found going on for 100 errors in my thesis, including two that changed the meaning of the sentence to the opposite of what it meant!

I made a list with page numbers and line number (it's easy to not find the error agian if just page numbers are listed!) and took it with me to my viva. In the event my examiners barely mentioned typos, and my corrections mainly included about 8 they had spotted. They clearly missed the other 90+! I did end up mentioning in passing that I had found some, kinda to preempt them saying it, and the examiners were said they weren't bothered about that!

In doing my corrections I also corrected the typos I'd found, but did not re-write anything else, even where I felt the language could be improved as I was told we weren't meant to make extra changes not asked for my examiners, but correcting typos was ok. I didn't have to provide a document with track changes for them to check.

My advice is to make a list more for yourself and don't worry too much about typos!