I'm personally not very good at hardcoring things - especially writing - which is why I want to try and plan to leave a suitable amount of time to write up, although obviously things very rarely go to plan when you're doing a PhD! It's such a slow process, I spend hours reading just to write one paragraph.

VidMaria - I get a bit obsessed with counting how many studies fellow PhD students are doing but it varies massively - even within psychology. I guess it depends on a.) how interesting your results are and b.) how time consuming your methods are. All my research involves neuroimaging so I only did 1 study in my first year because I had to learn the techniques from scratch. I feel as though my 5 experiments will only just about be sufficient. I've had to waste a lot of time piloting things that didn't work. Plus, although I believe my experiments were well designed and well ran, I haven't really found that much of interest. I have consistenly stuggled with knowing how much is 'enough' throughout my PhD. Alas, I will keep plodding on!

Hi all,

I've just gone into my 3rd and final year of a psychology PhD. I'm running my 4th experiment and I think I need to do a 5th one. I was just wondering, realistically, how long I should allow to write up. So far, I've written bits and pieces. I have a lit review that will act as a framework but will need re-writing to form my introduction. I've got methods and results sections for my experiments so far and (very) rough drafts for introductions and discussion sections. Basically, I've often started writing things up and then have become side tracked with the next set of data collection but at least the ideas are there. 0 publications sadly but I'm just going to go into panic mode if I start thinking about that.

So I know it's a 'how long is a piece of string' kind of question but I was just wondering what the recommended length of time is. (My supervisors don't have a clue). If I'm being optimistic I can finish my final experiment my March which would leave 6 months until my funding runs out. Does this sound feasible?

Thanks!

I'm really surprised that a lot of people didn't collect much data in their first year. I was told I should start running experiments within the 1st couple of months of starting. This turned out to be unfeasible as I had to focus on my Literature Review and couldn’t get ethics in time. Still, it makes me feel like I’m behind. I have to submit a 60 page report in September with an introduction, method, results and discussion section and I'm concerned I won't have much to fill 60 pages.

I’m not used to working without deadlines and I don’t really have a plan of action that covers the following years so it’s hard to identify whether or not I’m on track. I guess I should discuss this with my supervisor but it’s often difficult to get a straight answer from him!

I have no idea how many experiments I will need to do but I'm interested in writing my thesis in the Alternative Format which requires a minimum of 3 publications. A traditional thesis that I've looked at in a similar area to mine consisted of 5 experiments but this person may have done a lot more than 5 in order to get decent results.

Per experiment I only need about 20 people but my research is long winded and it takes about 5 hours in total to gather sufficient data from each participant and even then there are often problems with the way they responded which means I have to reject a lot of participants from analysis.

My supervisor has not said that he is unhappy with my progress and generally seems ok with the work I’m doing but he is so laid back I can’t imagine that he will ever put any pressure on me – even if I do start to slack off. I’m also very aware of the fact that he has never supervised a PhD student before so it’s a learning process for him too.

Hi everyone,

I started my psychology PhD in September and am worried that I'm falling behind already - its been nearly 6 months and I don't feel like I've done enough. I have a fairly good grip on the background literature and I've been running my 1st experiment with human subjects for the past few weeks. The problem is, my experiment is not going well and a lot of the data I have gathered is unusable. As such, I had to change my experiment half way through and now I think it will be early May before I have sufficient data to analyse but that will just be 1 experiment done. I doubt it will be publishable. I can hopefully do a second experiment before the end of the year but it is hard (though not impossible) to find human participants once the long summer holiday starts and all the undergraduate students disappear.

I know PhDs are very different from each other but I'd like to know how much people tend to get done by the end of the 1st year. My supervisor is nice but has absolutely no sense of urgency. He's not very demanding which is good as I'm self motivated but I never know if I'm doing enough.