hi everyone, lara, ruby
I bought Joan Bolker's book; was cheaper through amazon (than ebay).
I am now at page 62, today I did some freewriting and timed myself with that lovely online stopwatch
Today's time 53min. I wrote about why I like fruit salads, things I should do, things I want to do...
and 2 children's stories HAHAHAHAHA
Have a wonderful day:-) love satchi

======= Date Modified 25 Mar 2009 15:26:16 =======

Hey Ruby, great to hear from you! I agree you should take some serious time off and relax. after i submitted i took a couple of months off! then slowly got back into it. i'm still not studying full steam, just doing abit everyday. i tend not to berrate myself if i havent studied for hours and hours. as long as i do *something* even if its just a teeny winy bit, its OK. i just gotta study everyday thats all, even if its just for 15-20mins!! haha

but yeh, take time off , treat yourself, and relax. you got plenty of time to study for your viva, if it wont be till may/june.

nope not heard from my sup yet. but the main thing is, i sent him an update with what i am doing and what i want, so i've done my bit :) so i feel better about that. but in the meantime, i'm gonna carry on working on those pesky viva questions and reading though thesis and reading papers. so much to do! but just taking it one day at a time. i find that if i give myself a smallish task to do i tend to actually do some studying, not alot, but some. :)

bit by bit...

Hey Satchi! great to hear from you. well done on your 52 mins! glad that the timer is coming in useful. your post yesterday geared me into doing some work aswell, and i timed myself lol. throughout the day, i used the timer, to see how much time i was studying. its a good way to monitor your progress.

so my time from yesterday was: 1 hour and 27 minutes. and i made 4 pages of hand written notes.

thats really great that you got the book Satchi, and already on page 62! wow. and well done on doing some freewriting ;)

okay my aim today is :
1. answer viva question 8. which involves reading parts of my thesis.
2. read a paper and make notes
3. make rough key word notes for 4 new viva questions.

======= Date Modified 25 Mar 2009 15:27:47 =======

i am finding the really good advice that JB talks about coming in useful for revision aswell. i've adapted it to "revision" whereby i tell myself i have to write 2 pages of hand written notes and then i can take a break. i find that i cant simply just read *something* i have to *do* something- make it *active* ie make notes , even if its just verbatim copying it out.

Joan Bolker writes:
.."the sit there method - is to say that you will write for a fixed amoutn of time, say two hours, every day. there are not a lot of people who can just write - not stare off into space , not get up to make five pots of coffee......for more than about 2 hours a day. you can write for a very long time on any given day, but the trouble is you canthen do it again the next and again and again and writing daily is the pattern thats best suited to finishing a dissertation........ The [other] "many pages method" is to pick a reasonable number of pages and write that same number every day. ....I think the many pages method works best. If you fix an amount of time as in the sit there method, its possible to spend all or most of that time staring at the wall, and then you've both wasted time and produced nothing. The advantage to the many pages method, is that it rewards fast writing, writing about five pages can take between 1 and five hours. i'm not talking about 5 polished pages, but rather five junk pages, very close to free writing. But with a goal of five pages , the faster you can do them, the sooner your time is your own this method rewards learning to write faster....fast writing produces no worse results than slow writing does. "...


and this bit of advice i got from "study /revision tips" from this website. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-study.html
"Rewrite your notes.

This can be done by hand or on the computer. However, you should keep in mind that writing by hand can often stimulate more neural activity than when writing on the computer.

Everyone should study their notes at home but often times, simply re-reading them is too passive. Re-reading your notes can cause you to become disengaged and distracted.

To get the most out of your study time, make sure that it is active. Rewriting your notes turns a passive study time into an active and engaging learning tool."

http://www.johndclare.net/how_to_revise.htm#Notes%20on%20notes

" 3.

Fix the information

Revising is remembering. It's not 'revising' unless you're fixing it into your brain. If you spend five hours working in your room, but you still can't remember it in the exam, you've spent 5 hours working, but you've not done any revision.



Never just read your notes. You must always be DOING something with them to FIX the information in your brain (and probably the easiest way to do this is to write it down).

Notes on notes on notes

The easiest way to 'fix the information' in your brain is to:



WRITE IT DOWN.



Your brain has three kinds of memory cells - sound, sight and feel. The best kind of learning occurs when you use all three at the same time. Writing it down does this - you see the words, you say them in your mind as you write them, and you are using your movement/spatial senses as you write them down on the paper.

One tried and tested method is just to copy out your notes, by hand, again and again. Better still - because it makes you THINK about what you are writing - is to make a paraphrase of your notes, then a paraphrase of the paraphrase, and so on, until you have compressed your notes into a series of cryptic headings. Not only are these easy to learn, by writing and re-writing the words you have helped to embed them in your brain."

Hi everyone, I'm still plodding along with writing-up. I'm actually relishing the thought of joining you all in the viva preparation stage!

Has anyone prepared for that horrible question 'Explain your PhD to a lay person'? Grrr those types of questions drive me nuts.

hi how's everyone today? Abouting making a presentation to lay-people...and getting funny questions, well why not :-)
sometimes I ask my colleagues silly/funny questions, and fortunately everyone's been wonderful.
Yesterday I started using SPSS 16 (I'd never used it before) and did some exercises from a regression textbook. So I'm very happy :-) Have a wonderful day! love satchi

Hi everyone,

Missspacey, good luck with your plodding, it will be worth it to hand it in and move on. It's heavy going at this stage, but great to have the end in sight.

I got the Murray book out yesterday and it seems useful so far, from the first chapter. I guess I must have had enough rest if I've started thinking about the viva. I know it's probably not very sensible to think of all possible outcomes as that includes unpleasant ones, but I know I definitely won't pass with no corrections as I know there are mistakes in it, so that leaves the other outcomes. It's quite weird knowing that the examiners should have got their copies by now. One of them said to my sup she was looking forward to reading it, and I know she likes my work so that's nice to hear, but I'm really hoping I've done myself justice and won't disappoint her. I feel like there have been all these expectations of me by the various academics I've worked with and maybe I haven't been as good as they thought I was going to be, but the whole thesis is still so recent that I haven't got a very realistic perspective on it and can't see properly what I've done yet.

Today I think I'll start reading my thesis to see what I've actually produced, it's better than imagining what I might have written weeks ago. Then I'll get on with the Murray book.

Satchi and Lara, hope your respective days go well today too!

hi everyone :-) may I ask please, what is the Murray book? satchi

======= Date Modified 01 Apr 2009 19:29:16 =======
Hey everyone

hope everyone is good.

well my friends and family have adviced me to email my supervisor again and CC the admin from the university, to find out about the viva. they all keep telling me to get my head out of the sand and face it. and that what if there is a deadline for a viva and you miss it and you fail your phd because you didnt have a viva in time! so that freaked me out.

i guess i've been hiding , studying away, thinking if i keep postponing the idea of having a viva and i dont have a viva i wont have to face the humilation of failing my phd. in my warped head, it sounds better to say im waiting for my viva. then say i failed my phd. i have this overbearing sense of dread that examiners will either fail me or tell me to write it up as a mphil. then i keep worrying what my family and friends will say that i failed and what they would think of me. as a failure.

but i gues i cant hide forever. so i'm sending my supervisor another email to ask him whats going on with regards to examiners and when my viva date is.

one of my family friend says, that you end up forgetting your phd the longer it is, no matter how many times you keep revising. cause i said, i keep forgetting my thesis and i feel if i had more time i could study harder . but maybe even if i had a year its no gurantee that i would do any better at my viva.

i feel kinda bad having to CC the admin people as i dont want my sup to get into trouble or be seen as a tale teller. but i feel he will keep ignoring my emails hoping i would go away, and if i dont keep the uni informed i might get in trouble for not chasing up getting my viva organised

this is the email i have composed. not sent it yet. will send it tommorow, once my family friend gets back to me


Dear *X*


I was wondering if you have heard anything from QMUL or Senate house regarding my viva date. I would like to know how much time I have left to study for my viva, and who my examiners are, so I can read up on their work. I was also wondering if you know what the deadline is for having a viva date after submitting a thesis, is there a maximum time period after submitting a thesis, that one must have a viva by ? Have you heard anything from QMUL about when my viva date should take place by?


Thanks so much for your help. I have CC'd Mr Z and Ms J, as to find out what the rules are regarding viva dates.
Mr Z and Ms J- do QMUL set a deadline by which I must have my viva by or do Senate house pose a deadline?

Kindest Regards,

Lara.

Ruby - how are things going?

Armendaf = heard anything yet concerning your viva date?

Miss spacey hope the writing is going well.

Satchi, hope the paper reading is going good.

Hi everyone,

I hope you are all keeping well. Sorry for not have posted very often, but I've been up to my eyeballs with work. I've had very little time to actually work on the Viva preparations. Fortunately the term is coming to an end soon and hopefully I'll be able to organise better.

Last week I got some news about my Viva; examiners were appointed and the thesis has been sent out to them, so I'm now waiting for them to formalise dates, but I was told that it is likely to take place sometime around May.

Lara, I'm sure having a deadline will help you finish your preparations. It is a very good idea to cc the admin people with the excuse that you do not want to bother your supervisor with those details, and in the hope that they explain the process to you. That way it doesn't look like you are going above him/her with a complaint.

Best of luck.(up)

Thanks Armendaf, thats really good advice, you're right! And its nice to hear from you. wow you got your examiners sorted and your thesis is on the way, thats good actually. the sooner you get the viva done and dusted the better. otherwise its just like a black cloud over your head.

i still feel like i got a mountain of work to get through before my viva. i hope i have a couple of months before my viva is set. eeeek.

======= Date Modified 03 Apr 2009 08:45:57 =======
Hi everyone,

Armendaf, that's good news it's all moving along now with your examiners - at least when you get that bit and the viva date sorted you can get down to revision in earnest.

Lara, that email sounds fine, send it if you haven't already. I wouldn't worry about cc-ing the admin people, you need to know this stuff and you haven't said anything critical of your sup, you're just prodding him for a response of some sort and you really need one to get some definite guidance about what's going on. That limbo between submission and examiners/viva date is so horrible, my imagination went on a rampage through all the various possibilities and outcomes I might get, from nice to nasty! Try not to think about your family and friends thinking badly of you if you don't do as well as you want to, I know it's hard though. You'll probably be much more critical about it all than they ever will be. Sometimes I wonder if I've let myself down or my sups, and wonder what my research colleagues will think if I don't do as well as they want, but you just have have to deal with these things if they happen. Maybe it won't be as bad as you anticipated anyway!

I had a viva nightmare last week (it was in a room with glass walls on a busy corridor so everyone in the college could watch, I hadn't even opened my thesis let alone read it, people from all my previous jobs were there and then someone smoked a ciggy standing on the table under the smoke alarm so we all got evacuated.) It won't happen in real life as I'm not having it in THAT building.

I've got my viva date now, 14th May. I was glad at first as I could start revising properly, then by the end of the day I felt really weepy and burst into tears at work which made me feel a right prat, though the admin assistant was really sweet, but by the next day I was back to normal again. The admin person told me by separate email about the date and time, so I didn't know what my sups had been told. I mentioned the viva when I emailed them later that day and my sup pointed out that the time I mentioned was for the examiner's pre-viva discussion, not me. That made me think, oh blimey, if I can't even get my viva time right what else don't I know... Plus one of them kindly sent me a call for papers from a journal for a special edition that sounded 'right up my street' and I seriously can't think of how on earth I would write for that journal, it's a completely alien discipline to me, which also made me feel like I know nothing at the moment.

I asked about revision and one of my sups said not to read my thesis until about 2 weeks before the mock viva, so I come to it 'fresh'. My mock is a week before the real thing, though the date keeps changing at the moment. It doesn't seem very long to me, but they can't have a cavalier approach to supervising as their students have all passed, but it's very different to the advice in the Murray book. Maybe they've got a lot of faith in my abilities and/or my thesis, I have no idea. I think I'll start properly this weekend, a month's ok but Sup 2's advice sounds a bit last minute for my liking. It's not as if I'll be revising full time anyway. I'll see how it goes!

Just dropping by to say "hello" and see how everyone is :-) Glad to see that viva dates are being set so there should be quite a bit of good news to celebrate in May and beyond. I know the viva is a nerve wracking experience but one thing I did realise was that I knew more about my research than my examiners did. I know some will think that this is obvious but having moved from mathematics (my undergrad degree) to economics and having my main supervisor remind me at regular intervals that I am not an economist, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that I knew what I was talking about! So although you can't help worrying about it remember that you *will* know more than your examiners.

I'm still fiddling with the minor corrections but I'm getting there. My final deadline is in July but I've already got the "congratulations" letter from the university which was a relief. Just in case I get bored, I have a pile of marking that is as tall as me!

Keep up the good work everyone (up)