I am aiming to submit in July. I too am horrified at how much I have left to do, sleepless nights tossing and turning dreaming of calenders of all things! I am in life sciences, my thesis is comprised of four data chapters that need to be submitted for publication and a general introduction and discussion. I have a decent full draft of one chapter with just a few revisions before submission to a journal; a rough full draft of two other chapters; and the fourth that I am trying to analyse at the minute. Plus intro and discussion, which are not started, and not helped by the fact I am not sure what my thesis is "about" - I studied the ecology of a threatened animal, so while the outcomes of the research have practical applications, I'm struggling to make a theoretical framework to pull it all together! It will be a challenge to be done by July, but I potentially have a job starting then so it needs to be done.

My aim is to have a full draft of my data chapters together by end of May. So I need to keep my butt in my chair and write. I'm using a word target of 750 words a day, and I don't care if they are good words first time round, because my challenge is getting words on the page - once they are there, I have no problems editing and making a story, but gosh getting the words down is hard for me.

Where are you at with it all LabPixie?

Hi chinoxa, I am in Australia. In my opinion, Australian PhDs are rarely advertised like jobs. Probably less than 5% of people I know are doing PhDs that were advertised, most contacted a research group or knew the supervisors. I am in Biological Science, not sure about Engineering, but I think that given your specialised research interests, you would be best to contact research groups directly. Good luck!

Days, weeks....probably months. I struggle with procrastination. I heard about mytomatoes here, working to a timer really helped me to get started with work. Also, accountability helped - make shorter deadlines with your advisor. If your advisor doesn't care, can you ask someone else you respect (and are slightly afraid of!) to help out?

Hi Delta, what field are you in? My PhD field is ecological statistics, and I also teach statistics in medicine + psych. I might be able to help, or at least tell you if what you have done is statistically valid...send me a PM if you like?

I'm in a somewhat similar situation to you, in that we don't have strong statisticians in my department, my advisor isn't particularly quantitative (plus I don't trust her because she makes stuff up when she doesn't know the answer! So. Frustrating!). We also don't have a statistics department. When I get stuck, I ask everyone I know whether they know anyone who is a stats person. Everyone knows *someone*, the *someone* usually can't help but in turn knows someone else that can. You'll get there!

Worst case...pay a consultant for an hour or two. So worth it. If you count your time as money, it works out kind of inexpensive :)

There are many PhDs in my department, some have more trouble than others (often through no fault of their own, yes, sometimes they don't have good coping strategies, but in my experience the former is more common than the latter). Some complain more than others. Some people have a harder time near the start, some near the end. Sounds like this student is having trouble, both with recovering from the PhD and also has some mental health issues. I struggle to understand how this can "suck the life out of you". If just hearing about it makes YOU feel like that, imagine how the student feels!!! Anyway, seeing as how this bothers you so much, it sounds like you need some strategies for being assertive (sorry, but to be honest, at the moment, you guys sound a little passive aggressive). If I am busy or someone starts a conversation that I know will bother me, I politely excuse myself, or politely tell the person I am sorry, but I am busy and don't have time to talk.

In regards to your old professors comments - interesting thought. In my experience, whether PhD takes over life has more to do with the project, students aspirations, and personality of the student than life experience. My PhD has definitely taken over my life! I am in my last year, I have worked my ass off to get data (six months a year in remote areas working 12 hour days, every day), I really want to finish on time and move on with life/career, but I can't do that unless I work pretty much constantly, which in turn means that I am working all the time and my PhD is my life. And, I took 7 years out between Bachelors and PhD to travel and then work. I am aiming for a career in wildlife conservation with a NGO, so work is going to be my life for a lot of years to come. But I love what I do and wouldn't have it any other way. Plus, it's my choice, and not for others to judge.

KB, I've never replied to any of your posts, but have followed your journey with interest and cheers of support. I think you are amazing achieving all that you have. Your posts have helped me feel not so alone in some bad stints with my supervisor (I have 3, only one is evil, so I am lucky!) and some down times with anxiety. So even if this post is about you (not sure, don't care), the vast majority of us really value your input, and your honesty has helped many of us through hard times. THANKYOU!

As far as I understand (someone please tell me if I am wrong!), you use a t-test if your data has a normal distribution (e.g. bell shaped curve with histogram or nice even spread on a boxplot) and equal variance. If your data does not have normal distribution/ equal variance, you use a non-parametric test such as mann-whitney. If you have two groups to compare, they both have to have normal distribution/equal variance. If you have three or more groups (e.g. ANOVA situation) the same assumption or normality/equal variance holds. So it isn't having five samples per se that is the problem, the problem is that if you only have 5 samples, your data probably isn't normally distributed. Even if you had 2000 samples if they aren't normally distributed, a non-parametric test is much more robust. Hope that makes sense. Good luck!

When I used methodology as a subheading in one of my drafts, one of my supervisors told me: "not many people know this, but methodology is the study of methods". I never checked this out though, I just took her word for it and changed the subheading to methods as this supervisor is usually really good with language-y stuff.

Hooray!!!! Been following your threads for a while and crossing my fingers and toes for you! What an achievement to overcome all of that negativity and lack of support and get there in the end - very inspiring. Well done Dr. Pineapple!

Heya. I use R, after a few years tinkering with SPSS/SAS. I find R very powerful, and it can do anything that any other stats package can, which is really convenient once you know which code to use. It is a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you get the hang of how the code and output work it's fine. I hadn't written code (or had much stats experience) before I started to learn R, so it is definitely possible to teach yourself from scratch! I'd recommend The R Book (Crawley) for a step by step introduction to stats in R. If you are in life sciences you will find the tutorials and worksheets at this page really useful - http://users.monash.edu.au/~murray/stats/downloads.html. This course is how I learnt R. Good luck!

Hi there. Sounds like a rotten situation. In the first instance, I would suggest going to your university union to get some advice. I am doing a PhD in Australia as well, and am 99% sure that most universities have a union, with a dedicated person(s) who is completely independent (e.g. not employed by the university) and whose role is to provide informal and legal advice and advocacy for exactly these kinds of situations. I had some problems with my primary supervisor in the first 2 years of my PhD where I felt that she was not fulfilling her role or behaving in a professional manner, and I found talking with the university union's student advocate was a really effective way of finding out what my rights were, separating the personal problems from the professional issues, and in the end, resolving the problem (by adding another supervisor from within the dept). It helped that student advocate was completely independent, as I felt I was getting unobjective advice. Although thankfully it never got to this stage for me, the student advocate also told me that they commonly sit in on and mediate meetings between eg you and your supervisor, graduate coordinator, head of school, or even dean of research. Or, if you are not comfortable with that, they can contact them independently and lay down the law! Apparently these kinds of problems are more common than you might think, I got the feeling our student advocate had seen it all!

I think depending on your field, it will be very difficult to get a new supervisor in another state without them contacting your current supervisor for an informal chat or more formal reference request, especially if you are in the last year of your APA. Obviously I don't know the whole story of your current situation, but I don't know that your current supervisor would let you go - even if you feel that he has had little intellectual input in your project, he probably feels he has, and probably knows how to make a case for it. Also, I'm pretty sure that your APA is tied to your current university, and they would have to agree to you transferring it to another university. If you have less than a year to go on your APA (without extension), they would like quite hard at it, as letting you transfer would mean letting another university get the $80,000 funding for successful completion of PhD.

I think you are best to try and tackle this problem head on. My advice - go to your student union - today! now! - and get this sorted! If for some reason you don't have a union, go to student support and see a counsellor, they can guide you to the right place. But don't wait any longer!

That's a great one! There is some more good advice from Australians here - some of this specific to Australia, or to botany/zoology fields, but there is some good general advice too:

http://www.anu.edu.au/BoZo/Scott/Studentresources.html