Signup date: 14 May 2014 at 12:26am
Last login: 08 Jan 2016 at 9:57am
Post count: 145
It various according to the person and their work etheric/habits. Some people treat their PhD like a full time job (e.g. 9-5) and have the weekends off. Others work 12 hour days for 6 days of the week. And there are other who slack off for the first 2 years and have a nightmarish final year.
A PhD is like most endevours in life - you get out what you put in. How you approach your PhD will determine how many papers you get out of it, and whether you finish on time or have a rought time of things.
Do you have a complete draft of your thesis yet? I think I turned the corner in my PhD writeup when I had a complete draft of the thesis in front of me. That was when I truly believed I had it 'in the bag'.
Just keep at it, and you will hopefully feel that way before long.
You need to plan on the fly when you get into the latter stages of a PhD. This tends to happen on a daily and weekly basis. On the basis of this planning, you come up with small to-do lists. This is what Apollo and myself have suggested to the OP, albeit using a slightly different approach.
It's hardly procrastination. It's better to take five minutes to sketch out a plan each day and write a bullet point list, than to just sit down, open a document, and just 'work on it'. If the OP has two months remaining, then he's not at the stage where he has a blank document in front of him and just 'needs to write something'.
The way you are feeling is not uncommon towards the end of a PhD. After putting in the blood, sweat and tears for so long, it's so tempting to take your foot off the gas when the end is really in sight.
I was part-time, and I found that e-mailing little TODO lists from my work e-mail to my home e-mail worked well when I came home and did an evening session on the thesis. I made sure that those things were all achievable within a couple of hours. Then I could go to bed feeling like I'd made progress. For the weekends, I just sent myself a large list, with the tasks that required a solid block of time to complete.
Two months out seems like ages, but when it becomes less than a month, all of a sudden the deadline looms out of the mist. So I would throw yourself into it, and then you will have a couple of luxury weeks to properly examine your thesis for errors and apply the polish.
It's hard to beleive that there are hundreds of conferences each year in a particular field.
I would look at the theme of the conference first, and then who the keynote speakers are, and if there is a relevant session for your research, which will increase the chances that there will be colleagues present who you can discuss it with and get feedback.
I wouldn't worry. If your thesis is based on the current state of the published literature for your field of study, then it should be relatively easy to incorporate any new publications into your review. Depending on your discipline, it is unlikely that someone will publish a paper that completely supercedes your work.
And there will be other opportunies, as the previous poster said.
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