Hi Forum,

I'm really having a bad day today! :(

I'm feeling the pressure- it's March already and crossing out another month on my white board seems to have made me all anxious, scared and panicky about the end of my registration. In terms of offical time left, I have till September to submit which leaves me 7 months (well I'm counting it as 6 months!) to go! Although my supervisors have already said that it won't be submitting by September, but I would like to submit as close to Sept as possible so that I can start thinking about applying for the doctorate in clinical psychology for 2010 entry.

My supervisors have given me the end of March to carry out two more focus groups. Both of my set up groups have cancelled on me and I really don't know how I'm going to meet their deadline! They've set the end of March as a cut off point to collect all data.

As I've previously said on this forum, I've written 5 chapters (90,000 words) which I know need to cut down massively and I'm working through the reliability of my quantitative observational measure (so far with low reliability). But I still need to revisit my chapters (dreading it!!), sort through and analyse the qualitative focus groups data as well as set up two new focus groups AND start thinking about analysis for my quantitative sections, and put my index of analysis into place.

I have supervison in a few weeks time and I feel like bursting into tears!

Time really seems to be racing ahead and I'm starting to panic! I'm doing all I can at the moment to keep myself calm!

Any tips/comments etc would be gratefully appreciated!

:-(:$

I was in a very similar position last March. Just finished a final data collection with the analysis and bulk of the writing ahead of me (you've got a lot more writing done). I think you should let go of the September deadline. Make some short term deadlines - say month by month then broken down as you reach each month. I'm submitting March/April, but bearing in mind I'm on 2/3 normal time, I think Dec/January would be realistic if I were you. I got very stressed when I realised I wouldn't be done by Jan - but that just wasn't realistic for me and I the stress eased up when I set myself a realistic, doable deadline. I'm sure you can still apply for you clinical course.