Hi guys, long time lurker here, finally decided to join in the very last days before submission! Getting my thesis bound in 9 days, eek! Just doing a final proof read now and stressing about the parts where I have cited one of my externals... I've been using these concepts that he's slightly critical of and my approach has been to use them "in a way that is informed by" the external. So I keep going back and forth on how to word this appropriately and time is running out...

In terms of the abstract, someone told me to just sit down and write one in 30ish minutes without flicking through your thesis or checking anything. I thought that was really helpful as it makes it difficult to overthink and you end up writing down what the cores aspects of the thesis are. Of course it needed polishing but the basic content and structure were there.