Hi All,

First time poster here but I have read many posts over the years.
I'm wondering if anyone has recently finished their PhD and completed their viva after experiencing severe disruption from COVID lockdowns. Did you feel that there was more leniency due to the issues we all faced?

In the UK, the COVID lockdowns hit as I was about halfway through the 3rd year of my 4 year PhD and I did not really get lab access again for over a year. The timing of this could not have been worse for me. Upto this point, all my experimental work had been practice runs. Some work was decent but the vast majority was half completed experiments or not done in triplicate etc. At the time the lockdowns came into place I had a list of the experiments I need to do to get the data for my thesis. I got hardly any of this done as I literally had a few months to collect data that I was expecting to take 18 months.

On top of this, I have two disabled children and my wife is a key worker. During the lockdowns I was responsible for child care and schooling so I could not even really work on my thesis. Fortunately my supervisor was understanding and did not ask me to complete anything during this time.

I am now fast approaching my hand-in date (end of this month!) and I feel my thesis is a load of rubbish.... It is based almost entirely on incomplete data, most of the chapters have reasonable data at the start but the concluding experiments are not done etc. To top it off, my supervisor has pretty much gone AWOL since lockdown and has not even looked at my thesis to offer any feedback. Sometime I genuinely feel like I should bin it and move on...

I do get to submit a COVID Impact Statement (which is practically a book in itself) but I fear that my thesis will just be binned as a terrible piece of work (which it is in many ways as I don't have any good data to back up my claims).

Thank you for reading, if you have any advice or thoughts please leave it below :)