At my university there are a lot of training courses which PhD students are supposed to take. Luckily they rolled them out later in my PhD, after I'd picked up the skills already, so I didn't need to attend so many, but new students would be expected to. And then there is constant pressure from the department to attend departmental seminars, though like other part-timers I only rarely attend these. There's also teaching responsibility, though this is something that full-timers (understandably) take on at my university, so I haven't had anything to do with that. Meetings with supervisors are something else, but infrequent enough throughout my PhD (even quite early on) that they weren't a practical problem.

I'm a humanities student and have to go to archives to do research, and not ones at my local university. But my main work base is at home. I don't consider myself to be based at the university for my PhD by any stretch.

Good luck!

Unless they're part-time like me, when the figures change to 5 and 7 years. 2 years of grace period for writing up.

If you're doing research in a particularly good group then working as a post-doc research assistant can be a good option depending on individual circumstances. My husband did this and was recently promoted to Research Fellow, so pay does go up steadily. Not as good as a lectureship, but doing research he loves, and we don't have to move.

I've no idea at my institution and a bit reluctant to ask since my AHRC grant finished 2 days ago! I'm expecting to take at least another year to finish, possibly two. So I'm in the same boat 8-)

I applied for DSA part-way through my PhD after I won AHRC funding and was therefore covered (as a self-funded part-time PhD student before then I had no DSA rights). The assessment process was fine, even though I have a 1 in a million disease and the assessor hadn't heard of it. She was open-minded and thoroughly documented my circumstances and came up with lots of suggestions. The equipment bought for me under DSA was modest but has helped me overcome some of the difficulties from my progressive neurological disease. I live in Scotland and once the DSA award was approved by my funding council I was able to buy the equipment directly (more cheaply than via the recommended suppliers) and send in receipts to the funding body to be reimbursed. I believe the purchasing process elsewhere in the UK is a little bit different. Generally, though, I find that I get more practical help by negotiating support directly with my supervisor/department. We're also currently thinking about how the viva process might have to take into account my disability needs given my memory problems etc.

That's the one question I'm prepared for, given that I haven't submitted yet! I've been asked what I'm researching so many times that I can easily give a one sentence answer. Not in-depth, but summing things up enough for the required purpose.

Congratulations Pamw. That's excellent news.

I've been swinging between extremes as well, including recently plummeting again after some tough chapter feedback. Maybe it's the stress of being so near the end, plus the added pressure of getting things finished before the deadline. I thought things would get easier after the last year or two when I was in the major mid-PhD doldrums (I'm a part-timer). But I'm still swinging, though generally positive. Hang on in there. Good luck!

I've been told by my supervisors not to put anything into the appendix that is essential. So that rules out putting methodology in there. The reasoning was that examiners often view reading appendices as optional. So if you put something fundamental in there they might refuse to read it, and then moan.

An MPhil is usually a research degree requiring at least 2 years of work. It's not the same as a 1-year taught MA or MSc.

Good luck with the emailing Lara. I think it's a really good idea to email your supervisor: things need to start moving on, and you could do with some input on viva preparation. But I can totally relate to your not wanting to check your email for ages in case there's a reply ;-)

Hitting the doldrums at this stage is extremely common. It happened to me 2 years ago - I'm part-time - and I was extremely pessimistic about completing for the next year or so. But I kept going, and things have picked up.

Having said that your panel situation is a concern, and I agree that getting more advice about it would be a good idea. Mind you I've been uncertain throughout about whether I'd be able to finish, due to a life-threatening progressive illness. So I've had that hanging over me, but have kept going. Then again there's not much else I could do job-wise :)

Good luck!

Thanks for pointing this out. I receive almost annual letters from GRAD (or Vitae or whatever it is now called!) about GRAD schools, but none of them have mentioned this magazine which looks like an excellent read.

Examiners tend to be strict about total thesis word counts, both upper word counts, and lower limits. My university/department recommends a total of 80,000-100,000 words. I'm struggling to reach that, coming in at about 70,000 words for the moment. I don't want to pad the rest. It may be ok (I'm seeking advice about this currently), but my supervisor has advised me that being vastly too long in a thesis is much worse than too short.

As for how long each chapter should be, that should be work-out-able from your total goal and the number of chapters you have. For humanities and social science students Dunleavy in his "Authoring a PhD thesis" book recommends chapters of about 10,000 words. Much longer than that and he doesn't think it's possible to structure an argument properly over a longer length. Much shorter and the chapter is probably inadequate.

I have 7 chapters, and most of them are about 10,000 words, though some are much shorter and a few longer. But to reach 80,000 words my average will have to be over 10,000 - which requires a bit of work.

How many chapters are you aiming at and what guidelines has your department given on upper and lower limits to the thesis? Or have they just recommended a target total amount?

I'm currently working on my 4th version of some chapters, and my thesis is probably going to be deemed to be too short, so I may need a 5th version before I finish.

My original supervisor has read all the versions. My new joint one has just read the recent ones.

And for the other questioner: I wrote chapters from the start, but much of what I wrote early on has had to be chucked totally out of the window and I've started writing from scratch much later.