well my draft is ready to go in - except, in needs to be printed and posted and yes, today would be the day when my printer breaks and I have no car. So I'm going to spend the next few hours swearing at my printer, trudging down to staples and swearing at them for not hurrying up with printing and then messing everything up and then trudging into town to find the only post office left in the entire city. :-s

yep - I've had one too. If they can get round my "word has decided to stop working" message then I would probably pay them a lot of money

The death of amy winehouse shook me a bit, she's the same age as me so its a little bit scary! (although I am not on crack/heroine or anything else apart from thesis stress)

I've not written my abstract yet, but it will be under an A4 page, 1.5 spaced.

My word count (at the moment) per chapter is (ish)

Intro - 1,850
Lit review - 13,450
Method - 8,500
Study 1 - 13,210
Study 2 - 9,140
Study 3 - 11,750
Discussion - about 3,000 and counting - I reckon it will be about 6,000 though.

I use APA 6th. No I wouldn't recommend writing it in one document, mainly because word just can't seem to handle it, plus if you have auto saving on it takes longer etc. Its also visually a lot harder to work out what you're doing - well I find that anyway. I have folders for each chapter in my dropbox that include any writing and data collected - I find it much easier to work like that so you can go back to previous drafts of certain chapters but not others for example. And I always save my files with the date e.g. 'chapter 1 28-07-11'

drumroll...........So far my thesis is 183 pages (handing in my 1st draft tomorrow) and my first study starts on page 70. I have 1.5 spaced it.

Wow I have no idea how many pages mine is....runs off to check! (awaits word freaking out at document combining!)

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I'm in social sciences and my lit review is about 14000, but I've got an intro chapter which is setting out the key stats etc behind the 'issue' I'm looking at which is 2,000 and then I have a methods chapter, which actually has no methods in it - its actually a review of the theoretical approaches to studying my area and then a bit of literature about how hard it is to research in my area (Yes, covering my back a bit lol) that's 8,000 so all in all, I have....24,000 (is that right?) words before I get to the first empirical bit (which incidentally has its own mini lit review)

ETA - but if this is your first draft then keep it long - My first load of writing added up to about 45,000 words and I've been able to go back to that and pick out bits to make my final lit review - its been very useful! and I've just written my discussion by going back to it too.

wow, what a lot of spam we have this morning. Today is the final day of draft prep.

Goal 1: proof read and page number Chapter 1

I broadly agree, although I would note that there are also examples on this forum (very much me included) where people get frustrated with supervisors' actions and lack of support, but actually, sometimes that is part of the process. For example, I had just 2 meetings with my sup in my first year - but now I realise she did that to make sure I was working out on my own etc. 3 years down the line I can definitely look back on some of the more frustrating moments and realise the point of them now.

However, I'd imagine something like this will come in soon. If my uni is anything to go by, then PhD students will be far better supported in the future. Our undergrads (paying £9k a year next year) are literally spoon fed everything - we've just been told we have to view draft essays from each student for each essay next year before we mark the final ones - madness! and when those students reach PhD level they will probably expect similar treatment.

how awful! Glad to hear she's getting better - hope it continues!

this site is a little more international and from memory has a large ozzie base of people who may know more. Its also a big huge and scary though

http://www.phinished.org/