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Give me hope?
M

The mistake I and many other did was to go into the PhD expecting too much from ourselves. You are not expected to revolutionise the field in your PhD. You are just expected to show that you can carry out a research project for 3-4 years old or longer.

This kind of ties in with your question about methodology. I dont know anything about music, but let me try to explain it anyway. Say for example that in music studies you have 3 fields of reasearch: music history, the sociology of music, and cognitive music studies (just made them up on the spot! ). Music history you study music texts. Music aociology you study the context. Cognitive music you study the way music works in human brains.

It should be obvious that these three Immaginary disdiplines should have three distinct methods of going about collecting data and generating hypotheses: in history, you may chose a particular historical period and gather a body of texts to analyize. This is your methodoloy. In sociology, again you chose a particular aspect - say: the music industry and piracy, and you study the changes that piracy brougt to the production of music. Here your method is probably going to be interviews and more quantitative data analysis. Finally, cognitive music, you may work in a lab with some kind of monitoring device to see how the brain respond to music? Here your method is to collect data from your monitoring device and then analyze the data.

Feels like I could do a PhD in musicology after writing all that!

Viva coming up soon, Thesis has too many typos! What happens to failed PhDer's?
M

You're not going to fail because of typos. My thesis was full of typos (English is not my first language); they gave me three months to fix it and pointed out the typos. I did it and passed. I have seen much worse that my thesis since then, so I highly doubt they will fail you because of it. Also, they will realize at the viva that you know your stuff (or dont!), so no need to stress so much!

Tips to help my PhD S.O
M

I also think you are doing all you can. The end of the PhD was hard for me (its hard for everybkdy) and I was lucky to have my wife cheering me up. She would always cook something special every time a deadline was met, etc. Sometimes it' was just nice to take a walk in the park together and forget about the PhD for a while. You are cooking, cleaning, working, paying the bills...what else can you possibly do? Many people dont have anybody and they have to just suck it up. Maybe you are spoiling your partner a bit? Make sure you also have some time off sometimes!

As for the PhD, its nearly done, so no point in worrying too much. If it's good, then its good. If he needs to changes something, they will tell him exactly what at the viva. Often its just the fact of not knowing how good you research is that is crippling. It helps travelling to conferences and speaking to other academics, so you know that your reseach is good. But thats a bit late now for that!

I have been helping some friends in engineering
M

Thanks Treeoflife
I kind of suspected that. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that again and again, I asked question like 'do you mean this or do you mean that?' And I could not get a straight answer. Which kinda puts me in an awkward postion, because I feel like I am not doing a very good job! I guess in the future I am going to have to refuse doing these things so late.

I have been helping some friends in engineering
M

I graduated last year with a PhD in a humanities field of research. Last year, I was helping a friend from engineering to revise his thesis before resubmitting it after the viva. Then a friend of his also asked me for help, and so on. So I have been looking over a few theses from engineering, mostly from IT related topics. I just help with copyediting, making sure everything is in order, tables, figures, references, etc.

Now, coming form the humanities, I knew everything that was in my thesis. Every single line. So I was quite surprised to find out that my friends dont seem to know what's inside theirs. I ask them 'what did you mean here' and they dont know. Fair enough, they are not native speakers, but neither I am! Is this normal for sciences? There's so much data that maybe some of it doesen't make sense to you? I am not sure if I should think they simply copy-pasted stuff without giving it too much thought, or maybe science research is too complicated for somehone like me (not good with numbers and equations).

Also I wanted to say something to PhD candidates: I know its hard at the end, but make sure your thesis is in order before resubmitting it. The last guy I helped, his thesis didnt have page numbers. I wasnt sure why, so I asked him if in engineering its ok not to have page numbers, and he asked me to put them in. This is one day before the resubmission deadline. Crazy.