What's the first-year review like? any clue?

Depends. At my school, you need a full length detailed proposal covering a review of literature, method, timeline etc. This is reviewed by the thesis committee following which there is an hour long viva. The committe then decides to either pass it or fail it, or as is more likely ask you to re submit. Very few clear it without any modifications at all. Though this varied from school to school. I come from a school and a department which places high importance on this review as well as the Upgrade review which is said to be a mock PhD viva process.

best.

Thank you. I wrote a 100 page of report, covering all the necessary contents of a PhD thesis, coz i have already finished most of phd work in the first year.
What is this viva like?

U shud refer to ur own schools guidelines and I'm sure your supervisor wud have told u all this by now!

Personally, I find it AMAZING as to how you could finish "most of" your phd work in ur first yr.

You've already done most of your Phd work??? Wow! I plan to take it steady lol.

At my uni we have 2 reviews a year, one in Jan and one in June - I met with my supervisor to discuss our plan of attack and we're starting unsurprisingly with reading around the topic and creating a literature review and updated proposal which will be presented for my Jan Board, then we'll take it from there. Each time we have to present a paper which is then discussed by the board in a mini viva situation. The biggy for me will be the end of year and then the first of the 2nd year which is when the decision will be made whether or not to upgrade from MPhil (which all new Phd students are placed on initially) to Phd. Its an odd situation, I'm down as a Phd student, and am working towards a Phd, but have to prove myself lol. Nerve wracking!

the net amount of experimental work for a PHD student wont take more than 6 months. the former student of my supervisor finished his PHD degree within 2 years and published 20 journal papers. Nothing is impossible as long as one works hard

I see. My supervisor says that the first-year review is not crucial, so i didnt get much info from him. Hopefully everything should be all right. I dont have the upgrade involved as you do. But thanks for sharing with me your experience.

the net amount of experimental work for a PHD student wont take more than 6 months. the former student of my supervisor finished his PHD degree within 2 years and published 20 journal papers. Nothing is impossible as long as one works hard[/quote]

This may be true if the previous student has laid down the groundwork for your PhD: I've seen some students here having a much easier time than others for this reason. But if you are really doing original research, you're not going to do a decent job of it in such a short time.

Why does the "Quote" option never work?! That first part of my response was a quote, anyone who's interested.

You sure about that? My MSc thesis was 98 pages long for a 2 month project.

All expt work done in 6 months! :p

Well lucky you! But I can assure you that is not possible for a lot of people.

I can't see how its' possible to do the majority in 6 months... I dunno, maybe it is, but I know that my literature review and reading around the historiography will take that - that database creation will take around 6 months before I even begin doing my study - I'm looking at a good 2 years of solid work minimum before I can even consider writing up. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

Technically it may be physically possible to write 100000 words in 3 months. I absolutely stand by the fact that it is impossible to do "creative, original, indepth intellectual work" in 1 year. Because if it is, we all are lazybones out here to say the least! 8-).

A phd by publication is another issue altogether, a centennial professor I know did it in 4 months.

Technically it may be physically possible to write 100000 words in 3 months. I absolutely stand by the fact that it is impossible to do "creative, original, indepth intellectual work" in 1 year. Because if it is, we all are lazybones out here to say the least! 8-).

A phd by publication is another issue altogether, a centennial professor I know did it in 4 months.

Yes, you are right, our work is based on the classical theory including the first-principles of physics. But i think nobody's job in physics get out of the basics, actually i still read the papers published 60 years ago. Nothing is completely new or original, coz the theory is classic. It's hard to invent innovative theory or have the experimental work in lab into real practice. Most PhD's work aims to contribute a little part to the research in the field in the long run. But one should be aware that your work could proved to be totally worthless in the near or distant future. But why do we still do that, coz even the failure results are instructive.
So for my part, i strongly believe that dont expect too much originality and dont eye too high. keep down to the laborious experimental work and collect more results, among them you will dig out something valuable. Intellectual work is not always connected with a genius idea or plan, most of the time, it's a matter of repeated work.