You can change in that period at my university. A friend recently changed from FT to PT. it should just be a matter of contacting the relevant people (especially Registry, your supervisor and school/departmental postgrad secretary) and getting the necessary change approved. Shouldn't be a big issue.

If you have a full time lecturing position then IMHO you should have switched to part time PhD registration when it started, if not in that already (the 4 years reference suggests not), which would have given you more time to complete, with a longer submission deadline. You can't study full time now, so your time to complete the PhD should reflect the time you have each week, and be realistic. Would it be worth changing now? It might buy you some valuable extra months, without getting an official extension.

As for getting it done, well many part time PhD students juggle PhD research and writing alongside full time jobs. It's very difficult. You need to be brutal in terms of what you can do, and when. The important thing is to find a routine that works, week in, week out. For example are you using your weekends productively for PhD writing? That might be some of the most valuable time you have.

Good luck!

Make sure that your speaking slot is really 30 minutes long. Most conferences in my experience allow 20 minutes speaking time per speaker, with 10 minutes at the end per speaker for questions. So do be sure exactly how long you will have to talk for.

I echo the advice of others to do the corrections and move on with your life. This is just a stage you have to go through to get your PhD. It doesn't affect what you do with the thesis afterwards, whether publishing it as a book or articles.

If you fight these corrections now you are likely to make more trouble for yourself than not. At worst you will succeed in failing the PhD. Which would be quite impressive! At best you will have annoyed your examiners, and probably supervisor too, and will have damaged your reputation as an academic for the future.

Just do the dratted things. And stop being so angry. Just do them!

And for the record it is very likely that the corrections will take only a short time. They virtually always take vastly less time than people are given to work on them. And they are usually much less severe than people think.

If you need to give yourself a bit of distance before tackling the corrections that is fine too. But don't leave them too long.

And if you continue as an academic it is likely that you will face far far worse in peer review feedback for journal papers etc. Pragmatism is key.

I think you should seriously considering trying to get at least one journal paper under your belt before your PhD finishes. In humanities peer-reviewed journal papers are much more essential for academic job purposes than e.g. conference papers are in sciences. If you want to work as a post doc, or lecturer, or research fellow, you need publications. And they could give you the advantage over other job candidates.

I published two papers during my part-time history PhD. I was studying typically only 5 hours a week total for nearly 6 years. This was because of severely disabling progressive neurological disease. But I wrote two papers in that time as well as did my PhD, got them peer reviewed and published. And it's not really that time consuming, if you do it effectively.

If you already have material that could go into a paper - whether it be from your thesis, or side stuff as you've suggested - then it shouldn't in my experience take that long to write up. The key things are to contextualise it, to introduce the relevant context and background, and historiography. And the other key bit is to stress the "so what" as my supervisor always used to say, i.e. what's important about it.

Picking your journal to aim for is also important. It is very common to have a paper rejected and you then try elsewhere, sometimes multiple times. But that process can be trimmed by choosing your target journal carefully. Your supervisor should be able to advise.

This process will also be a good learning process for you, for future journal papers. And the experience may also feed back into your PhD directly, helping to make you a more efficient researcher and writer.

So go for it basically. Good luck!

Your examiners should give you a detailed report specifying what changes you need to make to your thesis. Wait until you get that before making any changes. Then consider what they've asked for, and start working through the list.

I really wouldn't be depressed about this if I were you. You've been given a chance - and time - to improve your thesis. And you should be given a fairly specific set of things that you need to sort out. If you do that you should come out the other end good.

I know several people who were given R&R who passed in the end, and with hindsight view it as a positive process.

Oh and the changes you need to make never seem to take as long as people think they will. You'll be done sooner than you think :)

Congratulations :)

Many thanks. I wonder if the limit to the title was the problem for me. My title - automatically generated as a reply to the message I'd been sent - was 51 characters. So maybe that was it. Increasing it sounds like a good idea! It didn't look like a very long title.

EDIT: Just got exactly the same error message as last night, but I chopped the final character off my 51-character title, and that's now let me send the message. I don't think the title length limit has actually been increased at all ...

Yup, thanks I got that :)

I've emailed the PG forum team as well, to get them to check things out.

This looks like a peculiar new bug. As I said I've never had any problems messaging before.

Just checked the numbers on the text I'm trying to reply with. It's 55 words, 314 characters (including spaces).

I'm trying to reply to a message someone sent me earlier today. When I try to send, it says "Please enter no more than 50 characters". My message reply is not very long! And certainly inside the usual 3000 character / 350 word limit.

Help! I have tried to reply in both Safari and Firefox on my Mac. I can usually reply to PMs with no problems at all.

I think the importance of conferences varies by discipline. In humanities journal papers are much more important for getting a job afterwards than having a list of conference papers given, and much low cost - though also much harder to achieve - than attending conferences. By contrast in sciences conferences are more important, and it's normal for conference papers there to be published in the conference proceedings, which isn't normal for humanities, where conference talks vanish, unless published elsewhere after.

HazyJane gives really good advice. My tip would be to have a very hard think about whether conferences are necessary in your field (in some fields they are not), and if they are choose very carefully 1 or 2 to attend, perhaps nearer the end of your PhD. Also make sure you exhaust all possible funding sources. Some conferences give some student attendees bursaries to help with costs, departments can have other funds to help, and if you are funded by a funding council they may help. Also there are charitable trusts that will consider applications for help with travel expenses too, though you have to be organised to apply in advance.

Good luck!

Oh and happy birthday for tomorrow!

Just let it be. They've said they'll look at the latest version. Leave it at that.

If you hassle the editor any more about this you are very likely to create a bad impression, and make it less likely they will accept any paper from you.

So just relax. Chill out. Have a cup of tea, and a chocolate :)

Good luck!

I would recommend just doing the corrections and getting your PhD. This is just a process you need to go through. And, though you may not want to hear this, very few people will read your thesis after it is finally finished. So allow yourself some distance from it. If you get a monograph publishing deal or convert it into journal papers you can represent it as you want.

You are more likely to cause yourself a lot of problems by disputing so many corrections now. Your viva was the chance to do this. So move on.