Hi Lucyanne,

I just wanted to reassure you that it is perfectly normal to feel weird after handing in your thesis! I was so excited about the thought of handing mine in, but when I got back in my car to drive home I burst into tears and cried all the way! I couldn't even explain why I was upset, I think it was a strange combination of relief, release of stress, and panic about what the heck I was going to do now! I had a week or so off, and then started my full time job. So I think a week or so of feeling this way is quite normal. After that, my new job distracted me for a bit, and then it was back to working on my thesis in preparation for my viva.
Have you celebrated handing in your thesis? I think it is quite important to 'mark the occasion', as it is a major achievement to get to this point, and although you feel a bit in limbo as you haven't yet passed, I still think you need some closure (horrible American word, sorry!) to that stage of your life, and taking some time to reflect on the achievement can help you feel ready to move onto the next stage.
Do you have a viva date yet? Starting viva prep might help to shake the lack of motivation off and get back into things.
Failing that, I agree with Dr Jeckyll - a holiday (even a day or two away) might be just what you need, to get away from it all and just forget about your PhD and work for a bit, and recharge your batteries.

Good luck with the viva!
Smoobles

Waiting to hear back after interviews is always torture, I know how you must be feeling right now!

I guess they didn't reply to your emails as they hadn't come to a decision yet, and so didn't want to put anything in an email that you could be misconstrued. They probably all agreed not to contact you until a final decision is made, so try not to read too much into that!

Best of luck, and I hope they don't keep you waiting too much longer!

Where has the 'quote' button gone?!

Anyway, I did all the checking of my thesis myself because no one else would do it for me, and to be fair, why should they? It was my thesis, so I was responsible for it. It was a long and boring job checking all the refs, tables etc., so unless I paid someone I can't imagine anyone would want to do it. I did ask family to take a chapter each and have a quick check over it to make sure I hadn't done anything stupid with the formatting, spelling and grammar, but I'm not sure they did that thorough a job as none of them are academics/scientists so they found my thesis pretty boring!!!

Obviously, it would have been nice if my supervisors had helped out a bit more, but I certainly wasn't going to pester them about it when I could just do it myself. I guess if they thought I wasn't capable of editing it properly myself they would have let me know, and either helped more or encouraged me to get someone else to check it for me.

I made sure my thesis chapters were as near perfect as I could get them before sending to my two supervisors. Once of them checked scientific content only, the other checked both scientific content and made minor suggestions for changes to grammar etc. I think it is definitely your own resposibility to thoroughly edit your thesis; your supervisor has enough to do! If I had sent a very poorly edited draft to my supervisors, I imagine they would have sent it straight back and told me to tidy it up before sending it back to them again. It is not their job to edit your thesis for you.
I sent my draft chapters out to my supervisors just once; they commented on the draft, and I made the suggested changes and compiled the thesis into a whole before sending it to them again. Pretty sure they never even looked at the completed thesis though. It was entirely down to me to ensure that the structure, tables, referencing etc. were done correctly, and no one checked them for me.

Firstly, I should point out that I am in the sciences, so some of this may be slightly different in the humanities, but I'll try to give general advice!!
I found that, to start with, it was important for me to be on campus as much as I could, if not every day then at least twice a week or so. This was the best way to get to know other students in the department (this will become more important as time goes on, as you will probably need their help/advice/support at some point!), and it was also important to build up a relationship with my supervisors. This is particularly important if you are doing your PhD in a new uni or different department to where you were previously; if you already know your supervisors you might not need to spend as much time with them.
Also, at the beginning there are lots of admin type things to be doing, and it really helps to make yourself known to the admin staff (again, this WILL be useful later on, believe me!) and it is much easier to get these things sorted face to face. You may also be required to have very frequent meeting with your supervisors (I think I was required to have a monthly meeting with them for the first six months, and after each meeting we had to fill in a form, signed by me and my supervisors, and hand this in to the department).
However, as time goes on, and your supervisor learns to trust you, I don't see any reason why you can;t spend more time at home/in the library/wherever suits you best. My project was almost completely computer-based, so I could have done it all from home if I'd wanted to. I did make the effort to attend department meetings, talks by other students etc from time to time, just to make sure they didn't forget who I was! I maintained regular email contact with my supervisors, and made sure we physically met up once every few months or so.
This wouldn't work for everybody, but I enjoyed having the freedom to get on with things by myself, and by keeping in contact with my sups they knew my progress and trusted that I wasn't just sitting at home doing nothing. Like you, I lived about 45 mins from the uni, and it was a total pain commuting in regularly. I think it depends on the supervisors, but if they see you are proactive then in theory they should agree, after perhaps the first 6 months or so, to allow you to spend more and more time out of the department.

At my uni there was no expected number of publications that you HAD to have to get your PhD (this is in the sciences). However, it was sort of expected that you would at least try and get one paper published in a peer-reviewed journal (or at least submitted to a journal) before the end of your PhD.
There are a few reasons for this:
1) It makes your viva easier - some of your work has already been peer-reviewed, so your examiner doesn't need to review it a second time (in theory!)
2) Work that is of a good enough standard for a PhD is good enough to be published - therefore why not publish it? If you get published early on in your PhD, there is some of the hard work done for your thesis already. I simply rewrote my published paper for a chapter in my thesis and put at the end "also published in XXX journal 2012".
3) Future employment - if you want to stay in academia, you NEED to have publications under your belt. To get a post-doc, I would say you need at least 2 publications in peer-reviewed journals to be even vaguely competitive. Posters/talks at conferences are also a bonus, the more the better.
4) If you want to work in industry, peer-reviewed publications are less important. For my job (in healthcare communications) they wanted to see that I had a variety of skills, so I needed oral presentations, posters AND peer-reviewed papers to make my CV stand out. Presentations at a number of different conferences (particularly in different countries) also look impressive.

Well you seem to have been pretty productive with your time so far! Is your thesis in good shape? If I were you, I would get as much of it written as I could in my spare time. I would also give it to my supervisors to look at - mine took ages to give me feedback on my chapters, so the sooner I could get them started the better! It gets frustrating when its coming closer to submission time and they take weeks to look at one chapter. So I would aim to get the Intro and maybe Methods chapters (if possible) as close to complete as possible to save you time later. Even things like formatting the thesis into chapters, organising the appendices, getting the contents right etc. can take ages, so now would be a good time to get this sorted.

How close to the end of your PhD are you? As you may find now is a good time to start job hunting. If you want to stay in academia, it might be a good time to start writing applications (even if it's a bit too early to send any in, you could take a look at some positions you like the look of and practice filling in the applications). If you want to work in industry, you could start researching the kind of companies you want to work for, and taking a look at the kind of things they ask for in job applications. For example, you could practice writing cover letters and getting someone else to take a look at them for you, so when the time comes to actually apply they aren't so time-consuming and stressful as you'll have done most of the hard work already.

If you still have nothing to do, then take some time off! Once you are into the writing-up / submitting / viva / working full-time stage, you'll feel like you never have any free time and you'll wish you'd taken a bit more time to relax while you had the chance!!

I'm guessing you intend to have your PhD by the time the job starts? In which case yes, I would definitely go ahead and apply!

I would really recommend that you attend the seminars, starting as soon as possible. They will help massively towards improving your confidence. In addition, you will get valuable feedback/inspiration/ideas which can go into your thesis. Also, questions may be raised that you had never thought of before, and that can be really valubale when preparing for your viva as you have some idea what questions might come up, or at least what the most likely areas of questioning are.
People who attend these seminars are not there to embarass you or try to trip you up, they are interested in your work and want to help. And no offense, but if you have no confidence in your work 11 months from the end, why do you think it will be any different once you finish? The time to work on your confidence issues is NOW, when you've still got time to do something about it. At my university, we had a rota where each student had to present at a seminar once a year. I was petrified before the first one, but it turned out to be a really positive and helpful experience, and helped me see my work from another perspective. The more you do, the easier they become.

To be honest, if I were you I wouldn't waste too much time on this. No one ever asked to look at my masters thesis when I was applying for PhDs, and I don't think they would care too much what it looked like anyway, all they are interested in is your final mark. By all means tidy it up a bit if it is really bothering you, but I feel the time could be better spent elsewhere!
On the other hand, learning LaTex could be a useful skill to have for your PhD, as apparently it is so much better than Word when it comes to writing up your thesis (I stuck with Word, which worked ok, but it does have lots of little glitches that apparently can be avoided with LaTex). I always intended to learn LaTex but never had the time once I had started my PhD, so now might be a good time to put in the effort! Maybe you could redo your thesis using LaTex, learning as you go along, and kill two birds with one stone :)

the short answer to your question is yes, you should follow the template. otherwise, what is the point of having the template? journals/conference organisers tend to get annoyed if you ignore their instructions.

I've experienced the same as Pixie. When I applied for a mortgage, the mortgage company accepted a letter from the university and my bank statements. I used to get an updated letter every year, stating what the stipend would be for that period.

Hi satchi,

Defer and suspend are slightly different things. 'Defer' is usually applied when you haven't started yet, and you want to push back your start date; i.e. due to start Nov 2013, want to start Nov 2014 instead. 'Suspend' is used when you want a break part way through your studies. It is possible (as far as I'm aware) to stop the suspension early and submit during this time; however, you would need the agreement of the university as during the suspension you would not be registered as a full time student, and so there would be some form filling/jumping through hoops to be done to get the suspension terminated early to allow you to submit.I doubt the university would stop this from happening, but it may depend on your funding. For example, if you are funded through a research council and they suspended your payments for a year, they may not have the budget to cancel your suspension and start paying you again, so you might have to continue without funding.

Not sure if this is exactly the same setup, but my PhD was funded partly by a big pharmacuetical company. Basically, they came up with a project, then they contacted the relevant supervisors at a uni, and together applied to a funding body for the rest of the money (and then advertised for a student). I therefore got a basic stipend from the BBSRC, and the pharma company paid me extra via a CASE studentship, which also included an allocation for travel to conferences and attendance on various courses etc. In my case, no confidentiality agreement was needed, as I was not working with any of the company's own drugs (I did refer to a few in my thesis, but just had to use code names and not give away any proprietary information! You may also have to make sure your thesis is not made freely available electronically via your uni).

Positives: I got to spend a lot of my time working at the pharma company, so got experience of working in industry as well as academia. I also had a number of supervisors from both places, so could call on a wider range of experts in my field. Also, the money is MUCH better than the basic stipend as I got an extra £3000 per year. The biggest plus point was the availability of high tech equipment at the company that I would never have had access to at uni, as well as skilled technicians to help out if anything went wrong! Oh, and the canteen did much nicer food :)

Negatives: never really belonging at either! Felt a bit caught in the middle at times, as my supervisors often had differing opinions on commercial vs. academic interests, and therefore each wanted my PhD to go in a slightly different direction. I won in the end though!! Definitely helped me to work on my negotiation skills. I have also heard of people in this situation having to actually 'work' for the company that are paying them so they have less time to spend on their PhD, but this was never the case for me.

According to my contract with the BBSRC, I was supposed to spend a certain amount of time at my industrial sponsor and a certian amount of time at uni, with money provided for travel between the two. However, I ended up spending most of my time with the company as they were much closer, and the uni didn't really care!

Overall, I would say it was a really good way of getting my PhD, particularly as I knew right from the word go that I didn't want to stay in academia. I think the experience I had of industry made my CV stand out a bit, and gave me more to talk about at interview! I work now for a science communications agency, and my 'insider knowledge' of the pharma industry has been a big bonus.

Hi,
I suppose my advice depends upon how much data you have. If you have enough data to make a solid thesis and it is just the writing that is a problem, then I would say find a way to get it done, even it requires an extension. On the other hand, if your data is lacking, then it might be better to think about possibly letting it go. However, at such a late stage it would seem a waste to give up now! I think you need to identify what the issues really are with your work, and come up with a plan to fix it. Then you can make a decision as to whether that plan is feasible. There is lots of advice on here about motivating yourself to get writing. Your supervisor should also be helping you out too - what does he/she think about the amount of work you have? Good luck, and I'm sure some other people will be along soon with more advice!!