Congratulations! Time to celebrate!

Congrats on your graduation!

I am still doing my PhD, but have similar experiences to glowworm's - my department is very small in terms of PhD students, and the situation is compounded for me by the fact that I live some distance from the university and am 20 years older than the other students (this would probably not matter so much if I was working with them day to day, but I'm rarely on campus and there's nothing to throw me in their path socially!). With the benefit of hindsight, this is also something I would have liked to be different. If you are going for PhDs, it's worth taking into account the department and opportunities for developing a support network, as I think it would make a difference. My situation has had a knock-on effect on my confidence, and I am quite looking forward to getting back into the world of work!

I agree with Hugh that academia sucks - I read these stories and think I'm not even going to go there. However, I also agree that it's worth trying again with other publications for the rejected papers, and the ones with suggested changes have a very good chance of being published. I'm sorry you feel you're getting nowhere - you do have some very impressive experience - academia seems so often to be purely competitive and not nearly supportive or collaborative enough.

Remember you have been studying your topic for years and you are the expert :-)

I think this is a feeling lots of people have, judging by some of the comments I have seen online. Good luck for Monday - let us know how you get on!

I need to have a period of a few hours each week for just sitting reading (novels, not text books!) in order to feel 'grounded'. One bit of advice I got was that you should choose a hobby that you can immerse yourself in, so that your mind doesn't wander to the PhD stuff - for my partner it is playing a musical instrument, for me it's reading, for others it's doing sport - something that engages your brain in such a way that you completely switch off from other things.

If the other person is starting her PhD a few months after you, I think it's unlikely that you're being seen as a guinea pig, given the length of PhDs and the variable rates of progress - it's more likely that the supervisor will think of the two of you as doing your PhDs at the same time.

Congratulations Dr Tulip! It would be interesting to hear about your viva!

Congratulations Drs Caro and Cherub!

At the conferences I've been to, most people are there to plug something they've done!

I haven't been through a viva, Caro, so hopefully others will be able to share their experiences, but I just wanted to wish you luck!

If it's a preliminary one, then I'd guess they'd be looking to see that you can structure an argument out of the literature you've read so far and use it to point to your research questions or the gap in the knowledge you're going to address, rather than showing that you've read every paper at this stage. That would be how I'd approach it anyway!

Hi GM
I'm very sorry to hear about your brother. It sounds like you might be dealing with some very difficult emotions just now, and things that are hard to process.
From having read others' accounts of finishing their PhDs (I'm still some distance away myself), I think it does very often create feelings of self-doubt. I guess you have been working very closely with this thing for years and now you are nearly finished and that would be enough to give anybody a wobble. It's great to hear you are still making progress - you are so far through the process that you can absolutely do this - but be kind to yourself as well and have breaks when you need to.

Another thing I am toying with is moving the methodology chapter towards the end of the thesis, to give it a much more 'reflective' role. Similarly to Pjlu, I have mentioned this to my supervisors and have received non-committal nodding, so we'll see!

I'm not sure what your discipline is Hugh, but I'm using my methodology chapter as more of a discussion of the issues, e.g. the types of knowledge and implications of using quantitative/qualitative approaches. I'm seeing that chapter as being more about the over-arching concepts and arguments, rather than a description of methods.