Hmmm interesting, cheers. I'm fine with doing corrections in evenings / weekends, I wouldn't expect to do anything thesis-related in work hours given non-academic job, and I'd also be living far from home and from my partner for the first 6 months. It's not so much financial as sheer boredom. I've already had 4 months essentially off (except 2 weeks after submission working on a paper, now under review), and am kind of thinking that 9 more months of this might slowly drive me a bit insane!

I guess more my concern is whether there is any risk that corrections could involve lab work - my thesis has a heck of a lot of experiments that I feel are largely decent, so I'd hope not, but with a full-time job that just isn't even possible (especially a non-academic one). Whereas without one, of course it is. Other than that, I'd definitely prefer to start work sooner, but this is a bit of a worry, even if a hopefully unlikely one.

Hi,

Had a question about that awkward post-submission-but-pre-viva period, w.r.t. jobs. So I handed in my thesis in July, my viva should be mid-December or so, though still tbc. Was v happy to be offered a job starting early December, and they'll give me time off for the viva itself. It's not an academic job (scientific consulting), and the offer is not conditional on my PhD viva at all...in short, I now care far far less about it and about the PhD to be honest!

Just wondered if others have started full-time work before the viva, and if so how it's gone, especially with regards to inevitable post-viva corrections (my thesis is rushed and a bit crap)? Is it risky at all? Part of the reason I ask is that I was actually offered a different job with a much later start date in 2018 (also not academic, also not viva-dependent). There's very little between the jobs, so start date is actually a significant factor. My feeling is it'd almost be quite nice to have a job pre-viva, might discourage examiners from any such horrors like getting me back in the lab haha. But I'd love to hear any thoughts of others, maybe if you've done similar - most in my lab went onto post-docs, which i consider a bit different. I'll add that working hours are pretty reasonable, so I would hope to be able to fit things like corrections around these...

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. The addendum idea seems a good one. As said, it wasn't like something glaring I omitted - I had evidence from other means that the modificaton site was where we expected, so went on this - we had no reason to disbelieve this (either in theory or practice) until this extra expt threw up a storm!

My supervisor I think is along the same lines, kind of "what I submitted was correct to the best of our knowledge when I submitted it, and it wasn't like that knowledge was too limited".

To be honest, this has all become a bit less important thanks to a job offer that is not conditional on my PhD - so, worst case, I'll still have that!

Hi,

So I have a situation that I'm sure must have existed for many before, but haven't found anything out about it. I submitted my PhD thesis 3 months ago now, and should have my viva before the end of this calendar year. Right after my thesis submission, we sent off a paper based on the same results, they liked it but had a couple of things they wanted us to do and add on review, as in new experiments.

Basically, one of these threw up a totally unexpected result that essentially destroys a fundamental tenet of the thesis! (As in, the thesis data is otherwise all perfectly valid, it just doesn't mean what we thought and is basically not very relevant to the biological system we studied any more). Pretty much, we believed we were adding a sugar at a defined site on an enzyme to mimic a biological system, had 3 chapters discussing study of this, but actually it was at a different site...so, erm, bit of a disaster! Should add, we did have some evidence previously to support our initial conclusions, it was just disproven by this extra experiment that we didn't do before because, well, we had no reason not to distrust the earlier evidence.

I don't care too much about the paper, I have no interest in going into academia / post-doc. But I'm worried about the PhD. I don't want to have to fail after 4.5 years! What's, in your opinion, the best course of action? Defend my thesis results in the viva, even though I know they aren't actually right? (This is my intuition - at the time, I had no reason to doubt them, it's not an actual error and science gets disproved all the time, just usually not this quickly I guess). Or somehow re-write it? But that would be a major, major re-write with many new experiments needed - I have a job, I'm not really willing or able to do that.

Thoughts welcome!

Thanks all (only just seen this since my email neglected to alert me to replies, my bad!). This is what I'd hoped, to be fair 2 months further on from submission it seems rather less important...

Hi,

I recently submitted my PhD thesis (chemistry), and am now waiting around for a viva - date to be finalised but in 3 months or so. I'm also now writing up a paper from my thesis, meaning I annoyingly have to re-open my thesis chapters that I'd really rather never see again just to copy images across to the paper and so on.

During this, to my horror, I found a pretty significant formatting error in my final chapter (6) - basically, all my text got pushed a line down when I did a final seemingly insignificant change to a figure, meaning that from about halfway through the chapter onwards, the figure captions have been pushed onto the page after the figure itself. I've no idea how I didn't notice this, but I didn't, and the (one-sided) printed thesis will have this error. It affects about 7 figures.

Obviously I'm massively annoyed and kind of worried about how examiners will react to this, as it's pretty sloppy - I was somewhat rushed during printing and was more checking that the pages were in order etc. Has anyone ever done something similarly stupid and if so (how) did it work out? All the other chapters, which are the first 300 pages or so, are fine. I'm more concerned that the figures might not make much sense if they fail to realise this error...the figure numbers referred to in the text end up on the wrong page.

Any advice / similar experiences appreciated!

Matt