Hi Worrier, the last few months are pretty grim, but it's definitely worth seeing it through to the end if you can. I'm in the corrections stage now, but you've reminded me just how depressing the pre-submission phase was. I'm SO glad I'll never be in that situation again! I think it's possibly the most difficult thing I've ever actually chosen to do.

I know it's really hard, but if you can somehow dredge up the willpower to continue then it really is worth trying to see it through to the end. My supervisor told me to grit my teeth (or grind them!) or do whatever it takes at that point. I kept telling myself that I'd never be doing a PhD again, so that cheery thought forced me to do my best to plod on. I felt like a zombie for some of the time, just going through the motions of tedious writing, chasing references, fiddling with my bibliography etc, but at least every little bit feeds into the thing as a whole. I felt incredibly drained mentally and physically sometimes, and occasionally just burst into tears, wondering why I'd got myself into that situation in the first place. I pulled myself out of it by reminding myself that soon it would all be over and I could move on to something else. I was SO sick of it and wanted it to be finished, so it made me more determined. I'd got to the point where I'd invested so much time, money and energy into it that to not give it my best shot at that late stage wasn't an option. I wanted something tangible to show for everything I'd put into it, otherwise I'd be financially poor, stressed, tired and with a pathetic social life for nothing and felt like all those years would have been wasted. Plus I really did still like my subject, when the thesis pressure was taken out of the equation, so I had force myself to get on with it, though it was bloody difficult sometimes - I felt like I needed the academic equivalent of Bear Grylls and his strange scouting survival tactics.

You really do need breaks even though you often feel that there's no time, and also need to eat properly and get out and see people or it's harder to get through. Maybe you'll become a complete hermit/a scruffbag/wallow in papery, bookish chaos, get fat/thin/spotty/your hair will start thinning/go grey, but that's short term, it can all be sorted out afterwards when you've finished your thesis and you get your life back again.

It really is satisfying to hand your thesis in - you've written a huge volume of original research from scratch, you'll never be in that situation again, even with corrections! It's exciting to get through the viva and pass, knowing other people whose work you respect happen to think a lot of your own work. I'm assuming it will also be rather nice to finally be officially Dr so and so! It feels like a huge personal achievement as well as an academic one, though I still haven't got my head round it yet. I know it's vile at times, but you've come so far now and it's just a tiny bit longer and you'll get there and that'll be it forever!! Plod on and think of how brilliant it will be to have a life again, with a completed thesis that you can use as you wish. It's not a bad carrot to dangle before your eyes at this stage. Good luck! (up)

Do you have the support of your supervisor for this idea? Maybe it would carry more weight with the US universities if he/she approached the relevant staff on your behalf and used their own contacts to help you, if they thought it was a valid activity at this point in your work. Perhaps it would also help your case if you worked academic reasons for this visit into your ongoing research, so a stint in another country would be actively contributing another element to your research project. Presumably you'd need the agreement of your supervisor anyway if you did go abroad, but if it's not related to your research then it may be seen as interrupting your studies and therefore not a good idea right now. Do you have relevant research questions related to this idea, as if you do then perhaps it could be something you could develop into a post-doc project.

I'm absolutely not in your area, but we take on visiting PhD/post doc students occasionally at my uni. It's usually organised by the research dept rather than individual profs, although they have to agree if it's their area. Students generally pay a fee for the short experience of being in our institution and it is usually done in agreement with their home uni if it's relevant to their ongoing research, or they need to use research resources or archives based in our location. Sometimes visiting students also arrive via our research centres or projects. I don't know if any of this helps you though, but good luck!

I don't think it's anything to do with how prestigious a conference is that determines whether a paper has to be submitted in advance or not. I usually decide how important a conference is in my field by who the organisers are, the place it's being held, the keynote speakers, who's spoken at past conferences run by that organisation etc. I've never had to submit a paper in advance, but I definitely wouldn't say the conferences were low prestige either. Might it be related to the possibility of the event organisers publishing the proceedings or something? Your idea about emailing the organisers to check in advance is a good idea if you're worried.

I call myself a PhD Candidate rather than a Postgraduate Researcher, as it sounds a step nearer to having a PhD and there's less possibility of mixing you up with Masters researchers. Having said that, I've never got around to doing business cards and am also guilty of being the type that scribbles contact details on bits of paper, but your post and the replies will definitely prod me into sorting myself out now, so thank you for that!

Sorry I'm a bit late reading this, but that's excellent news, Bug!! You've worked SO hard since you started that you really deserve this result! That feedback is amazingly good, hope you're really pleased with yourself and take a well earned break now. It's so nice that you got the other news about your fieldwork in the same day too. It bodes *rather* well for the future, I'd imagine, and you don't have to be Mystic Meg to think that!

(up):-)(up)

I'm in a different twilight zone to you, less stressful than the pre-viva situation, but it's still mildly annoying. I had my viva in mid-May but still haven't heard anything official about the results yet, not even a letter saying I passed subject to minor corrections. All I know is what the examiners told me after the viva. The corrections have to be approved by a committee, but now it's the end of term and the examiner's report has only just been done, so it looks like the whole thing will drag on until the autumn now. I know it's not likely, but sometimes I think something will change as there's nothing on paper yet and someone will say oh yes, there was a problem with you, we've changed our minds about that result, SO sorry dear, but you haven't really passed after all.

It's a bit annoying as doing the corrections will clash with the autumn term's teaching which is quite intensively timetabled, but otherwise it's nice not to have to think about the thesis for a while and hopefully my brain will stop feeling like mush soon as well.

Great to have submitted though, Smilodon!! (up)

Hello there!

Lara and Armendaf, hope your work's going ok.

Lara, I'd agree with Hazyjane and Bilbobaggins about the revision. I started getting freaked out about how much I didn't know, but settled down to revising what I'd actually written and why in as much depth as I could. My sup specifically told me not to go off reading new stuff, but I did think about other work I could have cited instead of the ones I'd chosen, why I used them and not others, who else had done work in that area that I could name drop etc. I didn't use any of that in the end, but I felt I did know what I'd written, why the weaknesses were there and how they could be remedied in further research but didn't fit into that thesis remit.

Good luck with it anyway, do you reckon you're looking at a September viva now?

Armendaf good luck with your viva, you'll be ok, I'm sure! (up)

Thanks for the congratulations too, both of you!!! My computer died a few weeks ago so I've had an enforced break from a lot of online stuff including this forum. I am SO lucky it happened after the viva, but have yet to check how great all my backups have been to date.... Apparently I'm looking more human again now, I haven't had the official letter with the corrections details yet. I think it's going through the committee next week, so until then I will carry on being normal until I am forced to read my thesis once again!

I had two, the main one from my college and a second one from another uni. The second one was really important as he brought a different range of expertise and metholodogies to my PhD as it was interdisciplinary. My DoS wasn't a sociologist thought she was perfectly capable otherwise in expertise, but we needed another skillset to complement hers. That happened after my research went in a slightly different direction to what I'd envisaged on my initial proposal and needed extra expertise. It's happened with other students who also needed very specific knowledge that my uni can't provide, usually when the project is cross-disciplinary.

Why do you think he was appointed to supervise you? Has he got a different background that your other supervisor lacks? Though come to think of it, they do seem to give very inexperienced staff to some of our newer PhD students as additional supervisors, possible to train them up for the uni... nice for the staff to have someone to practice on, though I'm not sure how it works out for the students.

One thing I had to be careful about was keeping everyone 'in the loop' as they called it. I saw both my supervisors separately and as a team for tutorials, but we were always careful about emailing a summary of the main points of what was discussed after each meeting so we all knew what was going on. I know someone else has problems with her various supervisors, either with them disagreeing or not knowing what the other has told her to do, so if you can avoid that maybe life will be easier! It worked out fine for me though! :-)

Hello, thanks ever so much everyone!! :-) It's all about plodding on in the end, so your time will come too!

I'm knackered now actually, it's just caught up with me. Curiously, neither the elderly tourettes lady obsessed with traffic regulations, or the Waynetta Slob lookalike spraying her armpits with deodorant on the bus annoyed me today, so I guess I'm still rather happy! :-)

Thanks again everybody!:-)

Yeah, they get on my nerves too. They don't seem to get moderated as fast as they used to, or maybe I'm imagining it. Unless we've got more finely-honed inbuilt spam-alerts than the mods.... and more time to spot them.

Oh dear, I've been congratulated by a spammer...

Mods, if you feel like editing that one, please do - it's been everywhere this weekend and they are such long posts too.

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Wow, thanks everyone! :-)

Sleepyhead, on the assorted suggestions of the examiners and my supervisors, I'll have to get a couple of articles published as soon as I can. They agree that my thesis would work well as a book so I'll pursue that, and also we discussed a project with one of the London museums. I'm going to talk to various people who run some of the research centres here and see what emerging projects I might be able to slot into, and join a few staff research 'clusters'. I'll have a chat with the head of research too. Maybe our less than great recent RAE results will help me in a way, they might be more inclined to look for emerging researchers with fresh ideas, who knows! I'd imagine anyone who's just finished a PhD would be cheaper and keener to employ than existing research fellows who might have underperformed recently and not come up with the requisite outputs, depends on the extent of any forthcoming cull and cuts, I guess. Ooh, what a tough world we're entering, academia's not for the faint hearted, is it!

I think the admin takes ages to sort out after a viva, so I probably won't get my corrections officially for a few weeks at least, then it's 2 months to complete them. Until then, I'll catch up with life!
:-)

Thank you very much, lovely forum people! :-)

BilboBaggins, it certainly is a slog, it turned into a massive test of willpower in the end, just forcing myself to get on with it. I don't know if it's the same for fulltimers but the actual number of years it's part of your life is doubled, so no wonder it feels like it takes forever to finish. Hang on in there, you'll get there in the end. Plodding on has been my mantra for the past year, not wildly exciting, but it pays off eventually. If you change the lyrics of 70s soul classic 'Float On' by the Floaters to 'plod on' it helps lull you into plodding mode, it only works for the chorus, mind you, and it's probably rubbish advice for most people with more sophisticated musical tastes anyway!

You know, the nicest thing so far is the total absence of guilt at doing normal things. A friend came over for lunch today who I hadn't seen for ages, and normally I would have been getting a bit twitchy after a few hours and clockwatching, thinking oooh I've got my PhD to get on with, maybe it's time he went home, but today I didn't. I could even watch the Eurovision Song Contest all night and not feel guilty - hhhmmm, there's a treat! ;-)

Thank you! :-)

Sim, my PhD is a theoretical one but I've been doing it about jewellery in an art college, so working with designers has been part of my project. Two of the examiners were from traditional universities and from sociology/anthropology backgrounds so I guess seeing what happens in an art college was a novelty.

Two other things I forgot to say earlier, there are so many horror stories about vivas on here that I thought writing about an ordinary one with a normal outcome might help redress the balance a bit. So it was meant as that, rather than a triumphalist post.

Also, the whole PhD 'experience' is so difficult in many ways that I think I would have found doing it a hell of a lot harder without this forum. It's been very reassuring to read so many similar problems and questions that I was also coming across myself, even though I didn't post about them myself on here. So thanks everyone, whether practical advice or abject misery, it's all been very supportive!! Lara, Tractorgirl and Armendaf have been great, especially while they were submitting, and all provided me with a lot of support, so thank you! (up):-)(up)