Difficult - it's a conference paper. Best link I could find was this http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30020588, but it's link to the material has expired/it never really existed. My only advice is to look through Andrew Day's publications to try and find similar material - or e-mail him with a polite request.

I would try a room mate website and try to live with some other postgrads. Good for social integration. Also, stick to the west of the city - Broomhill, Hunter's Bar, Walkley, Fulwood, Crookes, Crosspool, Greystones, Nether Edge are all nice areas (some more studenty than others).

Yeah, I'm being cheeky and asking for a whole issue. If people have access but don't want to spend the time, the Marsh article and the Young article are the main ones (but all would be helpful :))

I'm really banging my head against a wall trying to get access to this. I'm trying to get an article published in the journal and just got R & R with both reviewers citing the need to use "contemporary literature", which really can only mean use the things they've just published in a special issue of the journal itself, so I'd be immensely grateful if someone has access to this

Cheer up Janine. Unemployment is hard (very very hard) but it will come to an end one day, so why waste your time/feelings being down about it. Things will look up, even if they're not great now.

Thank you all very much. The other bit of advice I benefitted from was to have established ("old") academics viva you as they don't have anything to prove and know what a thesis looks like.

Well, it's all done and dusted. I submitted in June, had the viva on Friday and recovered from the hangover (although now I'm ill - Sod's Law). I thought I'd share my experiences with everyone, since hopefully people will find it useful considering that a lot are horror stories. For background, I'm a largely self-funded (fee-scholarship and several jobs) Politics PhD who started in Sept 2009.

My prep for the viva consisted of reading the thesis once or twice and looking at a list of questions my sups and friends had sent me - a couple actually came up. The main thing I did, though, that stopped me freaking out was tell myself that actually, I'd been prepping for this exam for four years.

Anyhow, I went in suited and booted. The first thing they said was "We both enjoyed the thesis, so don't worry", which is always a good start, and then "You can take your tie or jacket off if it makes you more comfortable" (I didn't, if I'm going to the trouble of wearing it, damnit I'm wearing it). In total it took about 1 & 1/2 hours, with a wide range of questions being brought up and various decisions being questioned (they completely trashed my decision to have a two page conclusion, but accepted the reasoning). Anyhow, after the various questions about how I came to do it, what I thought the argument was, etc, we spent about 30 mins talking about publications and how to "butcher the carcass" for articles. Then they sent me out for a minute to confer, then called me back, congratulated me and said the thesis needed no corrections.

Frankly, it was the nicest examination I've ever done. The best advice I got (in retrospect) was enjoy it and remember, it's your thesis.

"There have been quite a lot of redundancies in the UK, and then people in lectureships at universities with known financial problems are also looking to move to less-threatened departments, couple this with the well-known last year of REF transfer activity, and currently the market is next to impossible for new PhDs. I think once the REF cycle closes, things might be a little less frenetic in terms of publication expectations but even then government policy means that it's very risky for universities to hire into permanent posts as they can no longer guarantee undergrad recruitment."

I'd echo the point about the REF cycle. The emphasis on publications should drop slightly after the REF has been submitted and Universities can broaden their horizons a bit.

The University may not use such a list, but what about individual departments?

Is your title a pun? As in, "The first "Thesis" would be "thesis", but it's the start of the sentence so it's "Thesis"".

And people say PhD students live boring lives worrying about inconsequential shite.

Yeah, I would drop the tone with people who are trying to lend a hand.

Also, if you want to justify ad hocery, call it an iterative-parallel approach (see Verschuren, Verschuren and Doorewaard). Also throw some other methodological mumbo-jumbo at it; for example, is your analysis in the form of a case study?

I see a chapter as 12k words. However, my chapters are something along the lines of 10k (first lit review/problem construction/this may end up being the intro), 13k (lit review) 6k (methodology) 3x14k (empirical chapters and discussion) and probably about 4-5k for conclusion. If a chapter needs to be long, it needs to be long. If it needs to be short (like my methodology) then I'm not going to witter on for more words. That said, Dunleavy's ordering of chapters seems spot on.

You should be allowed to take one suitcase and hand luggage for free, although some airlines have started charging for the suitcase.

Take a week's worth of underwear, a pair of shorts, a spare pair of trousers and 2 t-shirts and a shirt (at a guess you may need something posh). Bring all your standard toiletries and maybe a travel towel (you can pick one up for about £10 at Blacks or SportsDirect). Photocopy all your main documents (incl. passport) and keep these copies away from the originals - suitcase/handluggage. I'd also have a good £100-£150 worth of AUD to hand in case you need it. Lastly, I would recommend a map of the place you're going and a compass - comes in mightly handy when you're learning a new city/lost.

That's advice.

As for wisdom, I have seen this message in both a bus station in Krabi, Thailand (pictured) and in a resturant in Bratislava, Solvakia. Each time I took a photo (although this one is not mine) and made it the background to my phone.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rollerboogie/32974836/