http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=3680

Until recently London Met was 'grey-listed' which means that all members of the academic community were asked not to go to conferences/accept jobs/do collaborative work etc with the uni because of the decisions of managers to sack a large number of staff to recoup money lost for being fined for over-recruiting undergraduates. Or something like that. I don't think this bad behaviour will affect the way in which employers will think about London Met, you may just not want to go to a uni that behaves in this way. Kingston is alright. maybe a bit more prestigious than London Met, and I dont know what UCA is.

For your MA I think it is important to attend a good university, more so than for your PhD (where the reputation of your supervisor matters most). But often these charge more for their fees and there is certainly a sense that some courses 'sell' places on their courses to high fee paying students, and hopefully employers recognise that.

Maybe people on this forum are from London Met and can advise as to their experiences?

That is really tough. The same thing happened to me. I wrote an article for someone at a university (not my own and gosh am I tempted to name and shame in case anyone else ever googles him!) on the understanding that I would be named second author. He told me that though he would use my words he would not add me to the authorship as he still felt the article was his. a good 2000 words of his 6000 word article were taken from me verbatim. and there was nothing I could do.

but enough about me.

here you should think about mentioning your concern to someone else in the department, informally, and they may advise you as to whether you should have a quiet word with him, complain or something in between because they will know the terrain and personalities (and politics) better. you do need to do something, if nothing else than because if you look like your work is your supervisor's this may bite you in your viva. as well as being totally dispiriting. If dealing with it head-on puts you off, maybe indirect hits like requesting to change supervisors might help?

Most importantly you must do something. this could be the thin end of the wedge and you will have worked too hard for too long to let it slide.

good luck!

I am in the self same hell as you Pineapple. Everytime I take some out, there is more to add in. Nightmare. I too am submitting in September/October. The only thing I would add to the excellent advice below (especially crossing stuff off the list -my favourite hobby!) is to check that there is not a minimum time scale by which youhave to alert the exams office to the fact that you want to submit your thesis. At my uni it is 3 months, and you have to have your examiners in place. Maybe you should check that this is not the case with yours so as to avoid any delay once those blasted words are on the page! Good luck.

back to work for me...

Hi Martie_28,

This sounds like a stressful nightmare.

It sounds like you are in a different discipline to me, but in my discipline there is very much the sense that the thesis is YOUR thesis, rather then your supervisor's.  Indeed, when you have to defend the thesis in the Viva, it will be harder for you to demonstrate that the work is all yours, if your supervisor has had loads of input into it, so it may be in your interests to stop writing and submit a document in the form you want to.

If you have to do more writing/ experiments, this might put your submission date back for months. I think you can reasonably say that you are not prepared to be fund-less and phd-less just to do work that in your opinion has nothing to do with your focus -and maybe again you should steer clear of it in case in the Viva they ask you why you have an extra chapter about such an unrelated topic and ask you to take it out. I bet you would be furious if you had delayed submission just to have to take out the section that had caused the delay in the first place! It is actually very bad practice to make students do work for the supervisor which has nothing to do with their thesis, and if he forces you to do it, and it really is not related to the focus of your thesis, you might have grounds for complaint.

It sounds like your supervisor, not unlike mine, is really inconsistent and indecisive. I was writing funding bids for mine, and every other conversation was 'we should do A', 'we should scrap A and do B',' what happened to A and why is there this B rubbish?'. When I realised that this was his 'style' I decided to deploy some up-management tactics. which basically means you accept your supervisor is a nightmare and make decisions for your project on behalf of you both. and remain firm. put all your agreed points (including the ones you are going to do without his agreement) in writing in an email after your meetings so that he can come to terms with what you are doing and you can get on with it.

Your personal situation with your mortgage etc is an excellent reason to refuse to work longer for free and you are completely entitled to a life beyond the lab. You could just make your supervisor aware of the fact that you do not want to work without  funding, that you feel you have done enough and intend to submit.


If I were in your position I would do the following:

1. Tell my supervisor I am going to submit. If she/he is hostile, speak to the other supervisors, be satisfied that the thesis is in fact good enough to submit and explore how to do it without the nod from your main supervisor.

2. if that is no good, go to your post-graduate tutor, there must be a procedure in place when this happens

3. AND go to the student union welfare people. If this is a common experience of your peers, you ought to make sure the occurrence is recorded, even if it works out OK for you in the end.

You can always tell your supervisor that after submission you would be happy to work with him in a post-doc capacity on the experiments, if he has any funding (hoho!).

You mustn't give up though! And you might find that feeding back this experience to your supervisor might be helpful for him with his future supervisees.

I hope this helps..

When I saw the title of your thread I thought 'that is me!!' I am reading and editing my massively overlong Lit Review and spend all my time either congratulating myself on being the next jane austen, or wondering how I even managed to pass my A Levels. If anyone knows how to stay on an even keel, please reveal!

Hi,

It sounds like you have the same symptoms that I have and are tormenting yourself over problems that you didnt think existed in the first place. I would echo Bilbo's advice and say that your writing style is personal. It is your thesis -your book if you like- and how you write it is up to you. with the 'I' thing, remember that lots of old school scholars think it should not be used too much (including one of my supervisors), but depending on your discipline it is completely appropriate to claim you own work in this way (I am in social science/humanities). Your supervisor is presumably in the same field as you so will know whether your register is appropriate, perhaps more so than your proof reader. If examiners ask you about why you are so keen on 'I' you can remind them that feminist theorists have suggested that not using the 'I' is a form of academic violence as it silences the voice of the author and assumes a detached masculinist objectivity which sometimes does not capture the reality of conducting and analysing research (!)

That said, you should try to make your thesis user-friendly so if your sentences are too long, have another look at them and think about making them into two. Or leaving them as they are if that works best for you. Latinate words are fine if appropriate but otherwise can be abstruse and un-user friendly so that advice might be a bit contradictory?

I also think that it is important to write in an academic way, but I would be surprised if you were not doing so if your supervisor hasn't mentioned it. Maybe you should ask them to confirm that it sounds clever enough.

In the end you should just be confident in your work, be pleased with your style and enjoy it. Someone whose job it is to check writing is likely to be a lot more formal and to rely on old-fashioned rules of scholarship rather than engage with the content like you, your supervisors or examiners do.

I hope this helps!

Hi, I am in the same position as you. In fact I am currently writing up now, and am doing so at home. I think whether it works depends on a number of things; do you have a good space to work at home? do you have the motivation to do it without being in an office? Do you still need the library (probably you will need this until the end), and if so, can you live without being able to go to the library at the drop of a hat? The biggest obstacle for me would have been with printing. Though I am writing I am still reading and try to stick to journal articles because I can get them more or less immediately by printing them off. Same with my drafts. But I can ONLY do this because I work in a University in my home town (not the one I study at), so I can use their subscription to journals to print them, and their ink and paper. I cant access any journals from home because I am not signed up, and the level of printing I do is so massive, I would hate to be printing on a slow home printer.

There is nothing wrong with working from home however. I have always lived 250 or so miles from my uni and travelled there weekly, so I am used to it. If you have a uni in your home town, you can usually join its library for a small fee and then use its facilities. being able to get started on work as soon as you wake up, without having to make your way into uni and having access to all the free tea you can manage should not be underestimated!

it depends on the environment you have to work in now, the one you would at home, and whether the stress of struggling to stay where you are now outweighs the inconvenience of not living where you study.

good luck with the write up!

Q

wow. that sounds like a gruelling schedule. I think only you know if you are doing enough phd though. and this is a question i have been asking myself for the whole time i have been doing mine (I am at the end of my third year as a full time student and have worked in an unrelated job 2.5 days a week throughout). Are you doing yours full or part time? Do your supervisors think you output is good so far? Is your PhD in the lab? Or 'in the field'? Or book based? Can you do any phd at work? Your schedule would not be sustainable for me. Though I work everyday, I also count snippets of work I do in transit so to speak -on the tube, on the bus, bibliographies whilst watching eastenders etc etc.
Also, to be honest, my research was empirical so in the second year I was doing lots of admin -getting access to participants etc and so would say that i didnt do that much in year 2, and what I did do I could do at work. It is in year 3 that i have paid the price for that! If it works for you then good luck...

hmm.. well i dont use endnote. I like to get back to the old school and surround myself with papers, tossing them merrily around. yes, if you use the one that comes alphabetically first, first, you should be ok with endnote. weird that it doesnt accept that 2004a would come before 2004b...

Hi Dundeedoll,

for citations where the same author has written more than one paper in the same year, the etiquette is to put 'a' after the first one and 'b' after the second one as in your second example above. In your bibliography you cite them in the order you used them in the text (2004a, 2004b, etc etc). Hope this answers your question!