OMG I'm going to gain so much weight doing this. I think its the clock change too but I've been starving ALL morning, eaten 2 weetabix, a packet of hula hoops and a drifter!!! and I'm STILL hungry :-(

wasn't that to do with the welsh lot - they had a 'do you speak welsh' question for the welsh survey and obviously they couldn't be bothered with the fuss of entering english and welsh data on the same datset or something - as it would all be 1 column out.

I'd hate to think how they analyse this. My computer freezes up with SPSS with 2000 rows

OK - I'm stuck already :-( on my title to a section :-(

Its about the key factors that influence my research problem and I don't know which word to use (e.g. *factors* affecting dog barking) . I want to say something like

Influencers
Factors
predictors

but none of them sit right :-(

my favourite was 'antecedents' but I looked it up in the dictionary and don't think it means what I thought it meant :p

any posh words I haven't thought about?

it depends on the uni. I have to pay £400 ish for my whole writing up year. If you're not writing up by the time your funding finishes, at my uni the fees are about £3,700!

My hubby has had to pay £40 per month at his uni for every month after his funding finished - he owes about £1k now :-(

Thanks all!

My progress so far

Chapter 1: Intro - needs to be a 2000 word 'statement of the problem' - I wrote about 1500 words 2 years ago which is now out of date :-s

Chapter 2: Lit REview - I wrote 3000 words last week, but haven't really done the main lit review. I have about 45000 words that I need to cut down to 8-10,000 and make it a good argument etc - this is what I'm doing this week and is horrible horrible task!

Chapter 3: methods - written already (I need to make a few tweaks to it, Walminski kindly provided great comments) so that's nearly done.

Chapter 4: I have a draft of chapter 4 pretty much there although needs a lot of editing.

Chapter 5: Written chapter 5 already for publication and that's been with reviewers in a 4* journal :-) for 7 weeks now, so waiting on their comments

Chapter 6: done intro, method, results but need to re-write these and make it decent! will take at least a week I think.

Chapter 7: Discussion - sup says we'll work on this after my 1 month deadline as it will bring it all together

bleugh! so lit review all this week - its horrible :-(

So after months and months of plodding along with my PhD work around my RA work and other stuff, my sup has given me 1/ a month off from my RA work and 2/ a PhD deadline

I have 1 month to write a thesis, starting today.

Wish me luck!

I've only ever taught masters students, so our feedback comes straight from the students' mouths so I've never experienced this. Sounds horrible!

Do bear in mind that only the people who want to complain actually bother to fill in the thing properly though and therefore the results will always be skewed.

I can only imagine this rubbish getting worse with the fee increase :-s

just one question Wal - was it a better feeling than getting 5 stars? 8-)

seems to me like, as they've paid you the money, its better for everyone that you're allowed to submit. I'd battle pass the 'official line' from admin and talk to someone who can actually do something.

I'm on a CASE - how long did they give you to write up in total? I'm into my 4th year and haven't heard anything about any final dates and I'm getting a little concerned that I might suddenly get a demand to submit in 1 week or something!

funnily enough his PhD isn't in maths though - its like maths in business - bleugh! so its technically social sciences

thanks Ady, tbh I'm for more worried than him! I doubt he'll even read the thesis through before going in - I'm going to read through it again and think of questions my poorly social science brain can come up with. Although I expect most of the question will be

"why did you choose to balance the denominator with a sigma x squared with a double triangle, funny symbol to the power of 300 minus omega squared, times 2 with e times upside down y symbol?"

aw I'm so jealous Batfink!

Trying to get on with work - I have a very squeaky bird outside my window though :-s

My big goal for today is to finish of a section of my lit review - it will require lots of concentration and no procrastination. URGH!

Wow I want to be a professor of the universe and then surely the next step is Timelord? or maybe Timelady? (sounds rubbish compared to timelord)

*chucks thesis draft in the bin and pays her $30*

My hubby has his viva in a few weeks. But we have literally NO idea what kind of things he'll be asked. His supervisor hasn't even read his thesis and will be offering no support (although not in an angry way - he just can't be bothered :-s ).

Hubby's thesis is basically him designing a new mathematical model that can test new stuff - the best way to explain it is its like going into the mathematics of regression, re-doing some of the equations, so now his new mathematical model can test more than the original regression e.g. like a new regression that can have multiple DVs or something (its not regression but you get the idea).

So he built the model, and tested it on various data.

I don't think he'll have many methodology type qs because there aren't really any methods as such, just a boffin in a room with a board of equations
:p

All I can think of is

- why did you do the PhD?
- what do you think are the limitations to the new model?
- what's your contribution?
- what was the worst/best part of the PhD process?

Can't think of any more! He has to do a 20 min presentation at the beginning of the viva too - which I thinks a bit weird, but there you go (?)