I thought you got into writing up automatically as you entered the 4th year.

I just found out (five shocking minutes ago) you don't. Your supervisor decides whether you're ready or not. If you aren't, you're a normal student, and have to pay FULL FEES, in my case, £10,000 as opposed to £300.

My supervisor says I'll be ready in two months. Surely things won't be so different in two months! Well, I'll be £10,000 poorer. Actually, I think I'll have to interrupt it until I find a full time job and save that kind of money. Any ideas???

how much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't panic! You might have to sign up to paying full fees now, but I'm pretty sure you can get most of it refunded as soon as you start writing up. You can sign up for direct debit so the fees come out of your account in four installments (I think it was November, December, January, February in my case). Another thought is to register as a part time student - £10,000 is a bit scary whatever way you look at it. With part time registration the minimum number of hours you have to work is halved (to 20), but they can't really complain if you work say 39 hours a week so you don't qualify for full time fees. It'll be okay (or not as bad as you think anyway). Chill

I think the part time route may be the solution here. Or if you could get research funding from your supervisor (which is what mine was able to do to cover fees and pay me a stipend during the last few months of writing up time).

I think you need to sit down with your supervisor and thrash out a watertight plan of "By November X will be achieved, and by December we should be at Y", because otherwise I can imagine the university will be very happy to continue to keep collecting your fees if your supervisor is the scatty type that says "Oh I forgot about that, it may be just a little bit longer".

Be careful about part time - if your department has minimum registration you may have to complete double the length of time anyway, i.e. two years part time instead of one year full time, which is just as expensive

Good grief!!!
have you paid fees up to now?!
Can't you write up officially but be doing the extra work unofficially?
or just start writing if you have enough to write up, and possibly complain about your supervisor. I've never heard of that before

**I thought you got into writing up automatically as you entered the 4th year. I just found out (five shocking minutes ago) you don't. Your supervisor decides whether you're ready or not**

Hmmm, this sounds very cock-eyed to me. I'm assuming you're full time and in the UK? Full time PhD registration is usually 3 years. My understanding was that the 4th year - although nominally called a "writing up" year - is merely an agreed extension of the the 3 year period. I've known people get to 4th years who have still been in the final stages of collecting data, whilst writing up what they could.

If you were, say 2.5 years in, your supervisor may reasonably feel that's too early to curtail data collection, as it's within the registration period. However I always thought that once someone exceeded 3 years, it's a matter of university policy on how the 4th year is administered - not the supervisor's job to say who is/isn't a "normal" student.

If you've already been doing it for three years, I'm also quite flabbergasted that your soop hasn't been encouraging you to write anything previously. How can you not be ready to at least write *something* after all this time? I think, frankly, it is quite irresponsible of supervisors to delay this process. Surely it is in their best interests to encourage students to write sooner rather then later?

If I were you I would contact the research student office at your uni to find out exactly what the regulations are for entering a 4th year. My feeling is that any regulations of this nature are (or should be!) consistent across the university, and not dependent of supervisors' individual assessments

Did you get sorted Jay2007? I think you said elsewhere your PhD is in history, so I can't really understand your supervisor's insistence on not letting you be thesis only. If you were a science student "thesis only" would mean you weren't insured to work in the lab, but...

Hi there,

Thanks for your helpful advice, and sorry about the panic.

The reason I'm in this situation is because my supervisor wants to do things by the book. He's the head of the department in a leading UK university. I've four chapters half-finished, in second draft, and according to the regulations you need to have a number of finished chapters to go into writing up. Some supervisors don't care about the small print, others do.

I'm only writing up, and I've been doing so for a year now. As a historian all my data was collected in archives over the second year.

I've been fully funded until now, so it's been a bit of a shock. I'm an overseas student.

The solution is: going part-time, getting a part-time job (which I was looking for anyway), using my credit card to the limit, and paying in installments.

Or interrupting, and being a ghost for a few months.

Nothing too bad in any case. Cheers

That's a strange rule - haven't heard it before. I can sort of understand how it would apply to a humanities student though. Glad you're not so panic(k?)ed now.