Bug, having said that, I do quite like reading the odd rant, creative spam or slightly barmy post as it's light relief from proof reading one's own thesis. It's a funny old life, this PhD malarkey, though I wouldn't have it any other way!

It might be worth checking your postgrad student handbook or similar for the official procedures surrounding submission, viva, completion etc, as we have similar procedures in place that WJ Gibson mentioned. It might be that your supervisor is oblivious to what is supposed to happen and what she has to do about your submssion, which could hold things up for you. There is an awful lot of university admin related to completing a PhD - I've been stuck in it for months and am still not completed yet. I don't like criticising admin staff, but sometimes you have to point out bits in the regulations and query what they are actually doing in your own case. It's annoying, but the alternative is the university procedures being bodged up, creating extra stress for you and endless delays in totally finishing the thing and moving on. When you know what the procedures are for your uni, you're in a better position to make sure you're not completely forgotten and your PhD doesn't fall into some bureacratic black hole. It's not very exciting to read up on regulations and procedures, but it's really useful to know what's supposed to happen with your work.

Good luck with submitting btw!

Hi Moomin, if your work has been up to PhD standard to date then I don't think you should worry too much. I know of a student who had appalling supervision all the way through her PhD, they rarely read her work before tutorials and were away a lot of the time. She ended up going back to her own country and worked with several friends who had done PhDs who helped her by reading drafts and commenting on the robustness of her arguments. She ended up with an unconditional pass (no corrections, not even a typo!). She got her PhD in spite of her supervisors, so there can be a happy outcome from some situations. Those sups haven't been used since...

I'd agree with Hypothesis. I found that going off on tangents sometimes sparked off my interest in related ideas and got me excited about my research again, when I was in a rut with it. It felt like an elaborate form of procrastination sometimes, but by the end all the tangents, or blind alleys as you call them, had either fallen into place in my overall thesis or given me ideas and material for post-doc projects or got used up in teaching, so none of it was wasted.

The only possibly problem with spending too much time on these things depends on where you are with your timetable. If you're writing up then it's probably not a great idea to go off in too many new directions or you'll never get the thing submitted. If you've got the time, I'd go down as many blind alleys as you want, it's unexpectedly exciting sometimes!

It might be best if you contacted individual people responsible for recruiting on those courses, or for running them, and discussing your case with them. They're the only people who can tell you whether your work experience might waive the need for a first degree for their particular course. Good luck!

Walminski, I didn't think you were attacking anyone and you didn't appear to be digging yourself into a hole either! I can't remember you ever attacking anyone on here actually. Thanks for the reference, I will check it out before expanding my exceedingly tiny (but valid!) samples in any future project destined for an alternative disciplinary readership.:-)

Agree completely, Bug.

Walminski, surely the nature of your sample and its size should be determined by the research questions you're addressing, as well by existing knowledge and methodologies in that field? If you're scoping a newish topic where little work has been done to date, a large sample isn't essential to argue specific points in your thesis, as long as all the decisions made about using that sample and its results can be justified in your methodology. It worked for me, though I'm aware I'm a social science/arts hybrid. I could develop some parts of my work into a more straightforward, social science project with larger samples at some point in the future, assuming I don't come to regard my PhD as too boring and pointless to develop, of course. :-)

I had to do seven copies when I submitted. I printed the lot out myself on a printer I didn't have to pay for at college, then it cost about £5 each to have plastic comb bindings in the nearest photocopy shop. I didn't trust the printer to last though, so I printed one complete copy of my thesis first, as my plan B was to get that photocopied in the copy shop then bound, as their paper was a decent weight and it would have been cheaper than buying loads of cartridges myself. The plastic comb bindings look cheap and nasty, but they're ok for submission purposes.

Verypoor, dismissing someone's PhD as 'very boring and pointless' seems a bit harsh! We all have to jump through certain academic hoops to get a PhD, so presumably it's valid theoretical research in her field, with appropriate research questions. I doubt whether I'd understand most science-based PhD projects even if they were explained to me in layman's terms, but I would never describe them as pointless. All PhDs have to have a point as they have to make a new contribution to knowledge - they might not all be about to change the world, but they do have a point, small or otherwise.

Hi Eska,

I think I'm in a similar area to you, but it's never occurred to me to put my supervisor's name on conf papers. I've always assumed help for students is expected to some degree in their work, as part of the student/supervisor relationship, such as in them reading and commenting on drafts. Maybe it's different for PhD students who are written into a collaborative, externally funded project.

Obviously I don't know about your particular situation, but whatever you decide to do in the end is likely to be influenced by what you want from your PhD. If you did it for career reasons then any decisions, whether it's networking, toeing the party line or submitting articles for not-very-anonymous peer reviews, might need a bit of compromise on how you work within the academic system or make your own personal views known. I'm not suggesting you need to become ultra-smarmy and suck up to people, cultivate any latent Machiavellian tendencies or cross over to the dark side, but if academia is your chosen career path for the foreseeable future then I think you need to accept it to some degree, including any of its perceived failings, particularly within the current, exceptionally grim, economic climate.

Probably won't make you feel any better, but I felt quite cynical during the latter stages of doing mine, it seemed such a treadmill and I wondered why I was doing it some of the time.... thankfully, plodding on to the end has helped dissipate the worst of those feelings!

Hi Louisa,

I've been thinking about all this stuff recently too, as have come to the end of mine. Maybe assessing your social skills isn't a great idea during the writing up stage of a PhD. It's probably the most solitary part of the whole doctoral process and doesn't allow a lot of time for doing much about it, if you think that's needed, although from your earlier work experience it doesn't sound as if you've got a problem! Myself and other posters in older threads on here have noticed how one's appearance and personal habits can change during the latter stages of a PhD, not always in a terribly sociable way, so it seems fairly common. Anything like hermit tendencies, bad dress sense, forgetting how to speak other than to the checkout girl in the supermarket, putting on weight etc can all be sorted out after submission, with less stress involved.

Networking is important so people know about your research, whether it results in getting involved in collaborative research projects from an early stage as a post doc, being asked to contribute a chapter to an edited book, knowing where jobs are coming up etc. I see it as an 'extra' that ought to offer me slightly more opportunities than any gained purely from the intrinsic value of my written research, or maybe just by making it easier to achieve what I want to do. Maybe this is where people with 'inferior' research have the advantage, although their work must be valid or it wouldn't be published/cited at all. I know what you mean though, where run-of-the-mill work gets published by people with connections, rather than anything more groundbreaking by those who don't put themselves about as much.

The prospect of 'networking like crazy', as a colleague recently admitted to doing, doesn't fill me with glee as I am still mentally in isolated PhD mode. Plus I've never been great at going to work events and talking to people because I have to, rather than because I want to. However, I will make more of an effort from now on as that's the way things work, especially in my field (the same as yours). Also, after all the work I've put into my PhD, I feel as if I owe it to myself to make the best of what I've achieved so far and see where it takes me.

Smilodon, that's a much better way of checking the corrections, I'll find out if that's possible for me, though my high image content might make it less viable. I'd have thought my externals would have better things to do than check a thesis for typos though. In fact, I'd have thought they'd be sick of it by now. I am.

They told me 2 months from receipt of the official list of corrections - so one last stint hopefully and then that should be it FOREVER!