Hi Mog,
Thanks for your reply. It's good to know I'm not the only one going through this soon! I don't have to give a presentation as I did one a month ago which was part of the process but was not assessed for the upgrade. I do face 60-90 minutes of questioning tomorrow morning from 2 academics who although they are in my department don't know much about my topic. However one of them is very hot on methods so I'm most worried about that mainly because my PhD doesn't involve any primary data collection as all the data I need is already available so that section is focused more on analysis.

I need to try and stop worrying, am going to spend the day going over my report and my practice questions one last time. I've made a list of 40 potential questions in the hope that I can cover nearly all eventualities.

Good luck with yours on Tuesday, I will be back to let you know how it goes :-)

Hi all,

I have my MPhil/PhD upgrade viva on Monday and was just wondering if anybody had any last minute words of wisdom for me as I'm starting to feel a bit panicked. I submitted my upgrade report 3 weeks ago and have felt like I'm in limbo ever since. I've been trying to prepare by going over my report and doing some extra reading in the hope that I can at least attempt to answer the questions I will be asked. I had a practice version of the upgrade viva with my sups earlier in the week and I think it was OK, it ended up being partly mock viva partly discussion over the sort of things I might get asked and how i should answer the questions. They think I will be OK but I'm just worried that I'm not going to be able to answer the questions on the day as I always get really nervous when people ask me questions, I even felt nervous in the practice version! Any tips on how to overcome this?

Hi, first of all your questions are good things to think about before you do a PhD. I'm a quantitative scientist so I can't really advise on the qualitative stuff. I am in physical geography and in my department there is also a good mix of human geographers, many of whom use qualitative methods. I don't understand qualitative methods as I have never used them but from what I know they can be used to good effect when doing a PhD and as long as the methods are suitable for the research problem and you can justify using them then it shouldn't be a problem. Obviously this will depend on which subject area you are in. Perhaps speak to your tutor for your masters if you have one or somebody in your department who would be able to give you an idea of how to go about pursuing a qualitative approach for your subject area. You mentioned psychology (not sure if this is your field) but I'm guessing that there would be some element of data analysis in that whichever approach you took.

Finally if you wish to pursue a PhD full time it will be virtually impossible to hold down a full time job. If you need to work full time to fund your studies which many people do if there is no funding available, then a better option may be study the PhD part time. Depending on your subject area you can expect to spend 35-50 hours a week on PhD work doing it full time. It is important to maintain a 'work-life' balance when doing a PhD i.e. finding time to relax and socialise is necessary to stop the PhD from taking over otherwise it will be too much.

Hope some of this is useful :-)

Hi I am also apparently 9 months in, doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

I submitted my upgrade report last week all 13000 words of it. It was a combination of what I've done so far e.g. lit review and what I am intending to do for the next 2 years, i.e. methods and initial data analysis as I already have data to play with and how I plan on structuring my thesis. In about 2 weeks time I have to have an upgrade meeting with 2 members of staff from the department. The staff will be acting as examiners and giving me a grilling on my report. This will determine whether I am allowed to be upgraded from MPhil to PhD status (everyone in my dept is registered as MPhil first).

Quite frankly I am shitting myself about it. My sup seems to think I have made good progress and in a recent meeting he was saying after the upgrade we can start planning my first paper etc. So he seems to be confident that I will pass, I just wish I was. This meeting is essentially like a viva with the outcomes ranging from pass, minor corrections, major corrections and/or resubmission or continue as MPhil. At the moment I will be happy with major corrections to my report because I know I haven't written the methods section as well as I could have done so am currently doing some extra reading so I will stand a chance at answering any questions they have about that. The weird thing is that these 2 members of staff know very little about my subject and my sup knows this so he thinks that they won't pick up on some things if they are not quite right. I really hope this is true because from what I've heard at least one of these people can be very picky and asks very difficult questions.

I also feel as though I haven't done enough but the report has been handed in so there's not a lot I can do now other than hopefully impress them in the meeting. It feels like my life is on hold now whilst I wait for this meeting to happen. It feels like a judgement day as it determines whether I am good enough to actually do a PhD. I understand way more about my subject than I did in October so at least that's something.

Sorry for rambling on, I live at quite a distance from my uni so don't get to talk to the other students that often and just felt the need to vent. Although as long as get through my upgrade OK then I will be moving closer to the uni which will probably be a good thing. It's good to know that I'm not the only one going through this as I know that not all uni's have an upgrade process from MPhil to PhD or that there is quite a bit of variation in those that do.

thanks for sending that :-)

Hi if anyone could access the following I would be very grateful.

Radiative transfer model for heterogeneous 3-D scenes
D. S. Kimes and J. A. Kirchner
Applied Optics, Vol. 21, Issue 22, pp. 4119-4129 (1982) doi:10.1364/AO.21.004119

Hi, first off well done getting a funded studentship. The money as you probably know isn't amazing but as long as you don't have extravagant tastes it should be enough to live comfortably, i.e. food, bills and rent should all be covered with ease. For me the studentship money is actually the most I've ever earned as I went straight from undergrad to masters to PhD, so for me I can afford to buy a few little treats now and again. You may need to buy a couple of text books depending on what's available in the library and how often you need to consult it, these can be pricey.

I'm only in my first year and I hope I will finish in 3 years but will have to wait and see. With regards to hours I tend to do around 40 a week as I try and treat it like a full time job. Obviously there will be some occaisons where you need to do more, especially if you are doing some kind of lab/fieldwork.

The most important thing I think for anyone starting whatever their subject is to get organised and use a reference manager. You will end up reading A LOT and will need a good system for keeping it organised. I use a reference manager called Mendeley which is free and lets you organise papers and notes together. There are alternatives as well which I haven't tried but I think there have been other posts on here about reference management.

Done (up)

Agree with previous post, filing is always useful whether it's on the computer or hard copy. It's definitely a good idea to keep things organised. Maybe reading a paper or 2 if there's anything that you've been meaning to read for a while but haven't got round to it yet. Also checking out publication alerts for the key journals in your subject, you can get these sent to by email for most journals it usually involves registering on their website. This way you can stay up to date with current work even if you don't have time to read something at least if it's been downloaded then it can get added to the 'read me' pile. If there is any bits of fairly easy data processing that need doing (obviously depends on your field) you could spend a bit of time doing that.

It's good that you are always looking for things to do rather than resorting to aimless web surfing. Hope I've given you some ideas.

I use Mendeley to organise and read all my papers in. I very rarely print anything and rarely make notes by hand any more. It was such a struggle doing my masters dissertation trying to translate my handwriting that I gave up and started typing everything. It seems as though the more educated I become the worse my handwriting gets. I make notes on the papers and highlight them in Mendeley and then write a brief summary in the notes section. I have all my papers organised by broad topic areas (most of them) but need to get round to organising them properly. The good thing is though if I want to quickly check something on topic X I can do a search in Mendeley and it will show all the papers that cover that topic, or I can search by author within my collection. I have a lot of papers waiting to be read as I seem to be very good at downloading things but it seems to take ages to get round to reading them :$ I seem to have amassed over 300 papers and over 100 are still unread, having said that some of the papers that I have read have only been skimmed and I haven't made any notes on them.

I would recommend having summaries of each article even if it's only 2 or 3 lines stating the main points from the paper because it will be quick to refer to when writing the lit review, and then you could always go back through the paper in more detail if necessary.

thank you :-)

Hi if any body has access to this paper and could send it to me it would be very helpful.

Woodward et al (2010) CHANGING CLIMATE AND THE IRISH LANDSCAPE, Biology & Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Volume 110

Have sent you Benn 1997, can't get the others though

In 2 weeks I have to submit a 13,000 word report which consists of a lit review, research questions/hypotheses, methods, data analysis and a plan for the thesis as a whole. The methods and data section are based on what has been done so far, since October, and is also a plan of what will be done for the rest of the PhD. After submitting the report which is read by both supervisors and 2 other academics in the department acting as examiners I have to have an 'upgrade meeting' which is essentially a viva where I have to defend my work. The outcome of this meeting determines whether I can upgrade from MPhil to PhD and also whether any corrections are needed on my report. I am a bit scared about this meeting because a few months ago someone who had to resubmit their report because it wasn't good enough first time has not been allowed to upgrade and can only work towards MPhil. Obviously there may be specific reasons for why this may have happened that I'm not aware of but I'm still scared as it does seems to be a very formal process.
I think my primary supervisor is more confident than me because in a recent meeting he has been talking about which direction to go in after the upgrade. I just wish I had the same confidence about myself.

I also had to give a 20 minute presentation yesterday to the department as part of this upgrade process but it wasn't assessed. I think the presentation was OK but mine was the last one from a group of 7 students and so I got asked more questions and my mind went blank and I felt like an idiot afterwards.

Sorry I've had a bit of whinge there about my situation. All of us first years in the office are feeling quite nervous about this. Good to know we're not the only ones going through this process though.

Fingers crossed that both you Natassia and me and anybody else who is having to go through this process will come out of the other side and can continue with our PhD's safe in the knowledge that we are heading in the right direction.

Hi, I know you said you have tried using a book but as with all books some are more helpful than others. Have you tried this one "Matlab: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving"? I had limited matlab knowledge when I started my PhD even though I had taken a few classes in it so I bought this book and found it very helpful. Maybe your library has a copy, if not it's available quite cheap on amazon.