Hello everyone! I have moved away from my PhD town and need to post my thesis to submit now as I can't get weekdays off. I've searched the internet for printers/binders to get my thesis bound in London at and there is a lot of choice but they all seem quite expensive and not knowing anyone who has used them means I'm unsure of who is reliable.

My thesis needs to be soft bound (hot glue method not ring) and will be about 300 pages. Anyone got any experience of a printer and binder in London they would recommend? Ideally it would be somewhere I could pick up from at weekends/evenings or delivers although I could maybe get away from work early one day to pick it up before 5 if needs be.

I'm jealous of my other PhD buddies who printed for free at our research institute and found places that bind for under £5 a copy as it looks like I'm going be be about £40 a copy after printing and binding but I'm so close to the end that I'd pay more just to make sure it's done.

Hi Boakster! I'm at a similar stage, I frantically redrafted everything (and drafted from scratch a discussion) in the weeks before starting a job. I am 2 weeks into my job and have just received comments back from sups that need about a days work, I still have to do appendices, table of contents and abstract (plus one of my sups said to do an abstract for every data chapter...does anyone else do this?). Which I think I achieve this weekend if I wasn't so exhausted from my new job! But it's amazing what you can achieve under pressure!

Haha I feel similar about my discussion! Mine goes something like 'my first three data chapters are alright, find something useful and work together, the forth one is made up BS that my sups made me do despite my better judgement that is flawed, shows nothing and is of no value'. But of course I make it sound like it is useful ;)

I'm having similar issues, but I feel like I've said everything I need to say (with a little repetition) in about 1700 words and I feel like it should be longer... I've been searching the web for advice and basically found that there are lots of different styles and lengths and as long as it suits your thesis it's fine. I've never heard of anyone getting many corrections on their discussion section hah. Maybe you need to step back from it for a day and go back to it, or give yourself a deadline. Mine all poured out in an hour when I knew I had to write it =)

Hi Tulip!

Getting out of the house was great, my friend was a PhD friend who has just handed in so it was nice to see what's on the other side. He also read over a couple of my chapters for me which was helpful hah. But getting out of the house meant yesterday I was exhausted, no idea why I was in bed by 11 haha. So I'm a bit behind where I wanted.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through working on my intro, I wrote it in January so I was worried it would be awful (my supervisor never got around to reading it despite me asking about 30 times), but I'm actually quite surprised as it reads well I'm just plugging in a few extra refs and deleting parts as it's a bit long. So I'll finish editing this then I'm onto my discussion chapter. Then the few typos etc that my friend and my other half have found in a few of my chapters (I hadn't realised I'd picked a different style of page numbering in each chapter...). Then just checking formatting and send it to sups by the end of today I hope!

I still have to format my appendices and make the contents page and lists of tables etc but I'm hoping I can do all that next weekend and my supervisors won't have any horrible comments (unlikely!).

Good luck today! It's amazing how much you can get done in a day if you force yourself to hah =)

Hi Tulip! I'm also working on my last data chapter today but I'm only going to work on it for a little longer as I'm actually going outside today to meet a friend for a drink (I went to the supermarket on Tuesday but apart from that I have been in my flat since last Friday!). I'm hoping going out will give me more energy to finish my discussion and read over everything tomorrow. I'm hoping to have my draft ready by the end of tomorrow and send it to sups Monday morning. And spend Monday formatting my appendices and oh yeah...preparing for that new job I start on Tuesday eek! Hah! Just keep thinking the faster you work today the faster it will be over!

Hah maybe Eds, but I think it was actually a problem with Word itself. I am now backing up on my memory stick though! I don't trust my laptop enough to save on the hard-drive ;)

Hi Tulip, thanks I managed to sort it out in about an hour in the end so it wasn't nearly as disastrous as it looked!

The job sounds exciting! When is the start date?

I'm feeling more positive today..lets get these theses finished!

Ok...so once I had clicked all the accept/reject and re-deleted comments it wasn't as much of a disaster as it could have been. The majority of my edits are still there. Word just had some kind of meltdown..I really don't trust it anymore!

I think I looked in that folder Eds, although it's in a different location on my computer and it was empty. Thanks anyway. Looking carefully it seems to be a really strange thing it's done. Some things I wrote or moved before 3.30 are still there and in the right place, but it's reinstated the track changes from my supervisor and the comments I had addressed and deleted are all back. But if I wrote something where the comment was reinstated it's gone...which is most of it as my supervisor went to town on writing comments. So maybe I've just lost 7 hours work...

So either it's Word gone crazy or something wrong with Dropbox where I'm saving it to.

It's word 2013, I checked the unsaved documents folder and there is nothing in there. The current file says I last saved at about half 3 when I think it was actually half 4 so I should have lost an hours work max, but it's gone back to what it was at about 10 this morning. Weird and incredibly frustrating!

Word has just undone all my changes to my document from the entire day...I was working on comments and accepting/rejecting comments, saving regularly when suddenly the whole document reverted back to the original before I had started working on the comments. No idea how it...and no idea if there is even a way to fix it. I think I just lost 8 hours of work...

Oh and well done Tulip! Super exciting that you have a job! Sorry I forgot to say that earlier I'm not quite functioning as a human being at the moment! :D

Thanks JoyofX, sounds like you are getting similar tough feedback as I am! I was mega productive last week until I got that draft back from my supervisor and it totally disheartened me. He has only looked at three of my chapters so when I send the full thing a lot of it will be new to him and I feel like he is going to say it's all crap and there is no point in submitting (he almost said that in his email returning my draft of one chapter last week). Luckily my first supervisor knows him well and said he does this to all his students and to ignore him..I hope he is right!

Hi Tulip, good to hear from someone else in the same position.

I finished my draft of one of the chapters but it needs a proper read over. I'm working on comments on another one now...the comments are from my second supervisor (although technically he is my first supervisor as my other one doesn't work at the university) and the comments are so petty and disheartening. In fact when my first supervisor saw what he wrote to me he was so angry (he said some things I would never repeat about said supervisor) and told me to choose the bits that help (because some bits do!) and ignore the petty rubbish. But that is just taking forever as he re-wrote so much of my introduction to this data chapter I can't even work out what I wanted to say anymore! I'll just keep plugging along...