Thank you. It was a long and arduous journey but thankfully its almost over! I now have to shift my focus towards job hunting while keeping an eye out for my viva arrangements which will happen slowly in the background.

Ah, the joys of acquiring supervisor feedback, I too encountered this difficulty at times. As you acknowledged, however, they (supervisor) often provide feedback in ways that we didn’t initially anticipate yet improves the overall flow of the content. If I recall correctly, your PhD is in Engineering right?

Thank you. It was a long and arduous journey but thankfully its almost over! I now have to shift my focus towards job hunting while keeping an eye out for my viva arrangements which will happen slowly in the background.


Ah, the joys of acquiring supervisor feedback, I too encountered this difficulty at times. As you acknowledged, however, they (supervisor) often provide feedback in ways that we didn’t initially anticipate yet improves the overall flow of the content. If I recall correctly, your PhD is in Engineering right?

@Polly33,

I too experienced a very difficult PhD journey that took its toll on relationships and my mental health so I understand how you're feeling right now. I'd reach out to your university counselling service if you haven’t already done so – I know it can be difficult at times to discuss these issues with friends/family. Your suicidal thoughts are quite worrying and you need to seek help as your mental health and well-being takes precedence over anything else right now. Please feel free to PM me if you like. Best of luck.

Your university will have literature on this in the form of a Student Handbook under the heading exceptional or extenuating circumstances. Usually you have to inform them at the time you are facing the personal difficulty as retrospective extensions/suspensions cannot be granted. So I’d imagine that’s going to be the major push-back from them. You’ll probably have to appeal to them in such a way that they overlook this aspect. Given that you actually submitted and had a successful viva after it, I’d like to think that they’d be decent about it and accept your corrections and award you the degree. Good luck.

Agreed. It's the only way for it to work effectively.

All good, recently submitted and awaiting examination. How are you getting on?

No worries.

Try Z-Library:

https://b-ok.org/

Very rarely lets me down. Good for articles too.

I'd contact them if I was you and politely as them for an update as you've handed in your notice to comply with the start date they've given you. That wouldn’t be unreasonable at all in my opinion. It’s possible that they work on slightly different time scales than what you’re used to (academia), but the fact is they can’t leave you hanging until you’re potentially out of work over what is essentially an informal offer (an ex colleague of mine experienced this when dealing with a start-up company). I know what you mean re potentially being viewed as problematic before beginning the job itself however the company has to be a good fit for you too, not just the other way around.

I began mines part-time but switched to full-time 2 years later. Like you, I had also just started my first job at the time working in the Aerospace sector. Although both in Engineering, the subject matter of my PhD was somewhat different to the day-job that I was carrying out my work. I was frequently asked to do overtime at work which, since I was new in the company, I felt obliged to do. However, this meant that I never really had a consistent routine in the evenings to work on my PhD. Naturally this got quite demanding after a while hence the switch to full-time. Thus, if you are considering going part-time I would recommend you really give some thought to what impact your day-job obligations may have on the working arrangements for your PhD. I learned this lesson the hard way! Good luck.

I'd eco what abababa says here. Even if statistics is not your strong point/emphasis of your PhD, you really need to take the initiative to understand and solve the problem (validate the data) by yourself. By all means consult a specialist. But fundamentally you must go through the process as by doing so you will gain insight into the problem/issue which will only help you when you come to discuss the data/results later in your thesis. Getting out of your comfort zone is part of the PhD process and attempting to justify decisions/steps that you've taken throughout with ``My supervisor said so...'' will only get you into bother at the viva stage. Good luck.

Hi,

To me it’s clearly inadvertent, especially if your initial correspondence went to a completely different person. Moreover, when it came to light that the Chair was your external examiner, you took the appropriate action(s). As long as you have a record of this, i.e., the email chain, I believe you should be fine. I would probably run it past your supervisor/advisor of studies though just so he/she is not caught off gaurd if this gets brought up at a later date.

Good luck.

I feel your pain, my thesis is due middle of Jan 2021. Main body is complete, just have 50% of the Introduction and 100% of the Conclusion still to write. I'm totally spent, completely uninterested in the work and frankly just want it over with now. I think many candidates feel this way at this point. My main issue is I constantly overthink the writing part (quite happy running experiments and analysing data) when what needs to be explained/discussed can be done so in very simple terms. In other words, I'm constantly worrying about what the examiner might want which is slowing me down immensely. Sorry I can't offer any constructive advice at the moment other than you are not alone.

Congratulations and extremely well-done on passing without corrections, I'm sure that's very rare. Enjoy the celebrations :)

@random_6772 Congrats and well done on pulling through such a sh*tty situation. I'm going through a very similiar situation and totally relate to your experience.

Try Alpha Academic Appeals. I recall them being advertised on this forum. You seem to have a case from what you've mentioned previously.