I'm after some advice from anyone who has completed or is near completion of their PhD. Mine is in Sociology & Communications and is broadly based on gender, feminism & sexuality. I am 3 and a half years in and the end is nearly in sight, or at least I thought it was. I had a meltdown at about 2 years in and felt like I couldn't cope with my topic as it's quite heavy (a lot of it is about pornography which, as a woman, ended up having quite a detrimental effect on me). Also, my style of writing became difficult to read and it was like I was making everything over-complicated. I've just had my first whole draft of my thesis back from my supervisor today and feel beyond awful again. I seemed to have been making progress over the last year - the small parts my supervisor had read were given more positive feedback and I passed my confirmation (mock viva) with no conditions. I was really happy to hand in the first draft a month ago and felt like getting this PhD was actually achievable. However, having read some of my supervisor's comments of the draft today I feel like this is a never-ending task. I knew there would be lots of edits to be made but the way my supervisor has worded some of his comments come across as quite aggressive, as though he is completely fed up of having to endure reading my thesis. I just feel really demotivated & alone - my supervisor barely saw me this past year and I've had no support at all from my school. Has anyone else felt like this? If so, how did you get through it? I'm meant to be submitting in 3 months - I feel like I need another 3 years.

Supervisor comments at this time can come across terribly. I say this as someone who - quite legitimately, it wasn't just a supervisor being difficult - had huge trouble finding my writing voice, and ended up having to restart my thesis after a year of part-time writing.

It's likely your supervisor's criticisms are not as bad as you think. What you need to do now is take a little step away from them, for a few days. Then concentrate on how you can turn the critiques into an action plan. Focus on each of his points, and work out how to fix it. Draw up a to-do list based on this, start tackling it, probably with the easiest things first.

Try not to focus on your supervisor's comments as aggressive/emotional. That isn't helping you. What you need to focus on is what you need to finish.

It is hard that you haven't seen your supervisor much in the past year, though that's not unheard of. My supervisor moved 500 miles away and I was very much on my own for the next few years! You can complete a PhD, but you need to stick at it, and focus on what you need to do.

And if you carry on into academia after you're going to have to get very tough about feedback from readers/reviewers. Anonymous peer review feedback is *much* *much* tougher to take than anything you will get from your PhD supervisor now.

But for now, as I say, step back. You've handed in your first draft, and you have your feedback. In a couple of days you will turn that into an action plan and get started. But for now treat yourself. And focus on the positive route ahead.

Good luck!

Many of us have this feeling of the end being in sight, in that we think we have a workable document together. Then comes the supervisor's red pen and suddenly we're seemingly months away when the dreaded red pen strikes. What was going to be late September / early October for me became mid-December.

You could be misreading your supervisor's intent here, however, in my case my supervisor would not recommend submission until he was 99% sure the candidate would get through viva with at worst minor corrections. I had a fairly straight forward PhD process, with a set-up that readily produced data (running joke was it printed off it's own papers). This lulled me into a false sense of security as I hit write-up.

Introduction, Methodology and Results was straight forward. Two to three drafts of each, okay so far. However, academic writing was different to anything I'd done before. Discussion took a gut wrenching five months as I had the learn the finer points of being concise and succinct in my writing style (explaining my findings in a clear manner in as few words as possible). Four drafts later, I was finally there - er, no!!! Conclusions took a month and a further three drafts and the two page Further Work a mind boggling two weeks. That said, all the work was worth it come viva - result: minor corrections.

If your supervisor is doing a decent job, the effort will be all worth it. I would be more concerned if your scripts were being ignored and if he's an experienced supervisor, these 'aggressive' remarks will be focussing your mind on the criticisms an external examiner might make. The later sections especially are your work and that work is what will make or break your PhD.

Meet and talk to him about how you feel. He'll have been there himself as a student, seeing and hearing it all before. He'll probably tell you the same as I'm telling you above.

Ian

I had almost exactly the same experience and it can feel pretty soul-destroying. Take a break and some deep breaths, go back to the comments in a couple of days and make a list of what needs to be done. It might not feel like it just now but the perseverance that brought you this far will keep you going a while longer and it's better to iron out these issues now than have them crop up in the viva.

I was equally surprised and confused by some negative feedback from my supervisor at a late stage when I had worked hard and thought I was on the right track, but in retrospect I can see that the thesis is so much better as a result. Also when I saw my sup face-to-face shortly after this - I'd even been questioning whether I was "good enough" to continue the PhD - I realised that she was generally happy with the quality of the thesis and I'd taken her comments much more negatively than she'd intended.