Today I finally got the email I've been waiting for following the resubmission of my thesis. I was eating out with my kids and spouse when I got the message which began "I am pleased to inform you, that your examiners have recommended that you be awarded your degree subject to revisions being made to the thesis to the satisfaction of your examiner(s). Please note that you have been given one month to submit your revisions to both of your examiners" and ended with "congratulations". I whooped and informed my family that they could refer to me as Dr. from now on!

Then I read the report. The changes they want are to my mind substantial though they say they are minor and can be done within a month. On reading what is required my mood completely changed and I apologised to all for misleading them. I'm now not sure where I stand. I had wanted to celebrate but don't feel I can. Is this outcome similar to what would have happened had I come out of my viva with minor revisions - fellow students who had this were considered to have come out of their viva as Drs. I know its daft but my ability to be positive about tackling the changes is influenced by whether I can feel I have passed.

Any thoughts out there. Should I be celebrating tonight rather than feeling miserable?

It sounds like pretty positive language to me. You've come this far; you can do this last bit too. It does say 'congratulations' after all - they know you can do it :)

Congratulations!

This is totally normal. I have very substantial corrections, and just three months to do them.

You are Dr now!

... but you will have to work hard for the next month.

Congratulations!

I am in a similar situation. I have passed my oral defense with minor correction. Indeed, there were only a few rewording, typos etc. need to be done. In the report, there is a section called questions (or similar), which has been asked in oral. They are not a part of correction from a perspective of official documents.

There is a long question that seems examiner would like to propose a new hypothesis. It aims to a part of my dissertation that tested a hypothesis from a published paper. That question is not relevant to my context, but talking about a field which close to what I have presented in that section, and the examiner has been working in that field for many years. However, my supervisor insists my to do a couple of more tests to answer those questions. I am not very sure if this is necessary. Indeed, I have already written a discussion to answer it. If I do this test, it becomes I am testing examiner's hypothesis, rather than the original purpose of that chapter.

I am very confused now.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated！

Thanks for the replies. I did initially feel elated and then I read the report. I feel a lot better today having chatted with my supervisor (who accused the examiners of wanting blood but then he was happy with my resubmission). I've found a way of responding that shouldn't be too difficult even though I worry that what they want is quite substantial. Its a bit frustrating that I can't contact the examiners to ensure that what I'm thinking of doing will meet the requirements. But he ho - I'm a Dr. at last! Though I do feel a bit like Shroedinger's cat at the moment. Need to hurry up and get out of the box!

To Dr. Ywan459: you certainly should be celebrating you passed the viva with minors! I wish I had. You just need to clear up the confusion over the questions section which sounds like a report of the thesis and viva and so separate from the corrections required. Do you have another supervisor you can check this with? Or anyone else in your department?

I do find that there is a lot of confusion surrounding the outcome of the oral examination, and supervisors don't always understand the procedures either. It makes it very stressful for students.

You may want to check with the examiner whether you can pursue this work as a separate collaboration project.
Because you have limited time to complete your minor correction.

Hi, MeaninginLife, Thanks for this advise as your other advises before.

impostersyndrome, if you do not mind, I'd like to make a reply regarding to my personal issues here.

MeaninginLife, that is not an option to me. I am currently having a job with an engineering company which I got it about 8 month ago. It is more than a lucky, I must say. So the collaboration research is not possible in my case. I had a long talk with him yesterday evening through phone. He seems want me to show a better result that uses quantitative figures to explain my original thought. Now the challenge thing is to reproduce those numbers. I am still waiting the computing results. A few sub-optimal results indeed supported my thought, however, I just need one more good number which close to a previous results and small enough. I hope it can be done very soon!!!