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How many publications?
E

None. This is something I really regret now. Problem is none of my PhD in Education classes had the opportunity for me to write up a good paper to submit for publication. Plus I was too pre-occupied with trying to get my comp exams going. I would have used my comp exams (which were supposed to be 30-page answers to three specific questions in my field of study) to submit as possible articles in journals, but alas, I never reached that stage (explained in a thread I posted recently). I do believe PhD students need at least one published document before they graduate.

How much paperwork have you amassed?
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I started PhD in September 2007.  I feel lucky I started then and not back in 2000 because technology has been my friend.

Since then I have acquired almost 220 books which are taking over the little studio apartment I have, haha. They are the resources I worry the most about.  I have an Excel spreadsheet with the author, title, place I bought the book, and price. I've spent nearly $4000 on the books.  Shocking, eh? Several books were over $100.  Disgusting more like it, haha. But I keep that file for insurance purposes because if something happened like a fire or flood I'd have to start all over and buy them again.  I've tried to find them in eBooks or something like that but wasn't able to. They're just too academic and specialized to be done so, blah.

I try to get as many articles in PDF as I can so I can read them on the netbook or iPad.  For those articles and archival records that had to be photocopied, I used my all-in-one to scan every one of them as a PDF and saved. Mind you this doesn't always work.  One PDF file was like 30,000KB and I couldn't get it smaller without seriously distorting the images of the photocopied document.

When I completed my Master's degree, I saved the papers and thesis I did, both hard copy and electronic copy. No books or articles.

For the stuff I have collected for the PhD that is electronic I do back up, and back up some more.  I have an external drive from Click that I back up every thing on my computer every month and put in my bank security box so even if there's a disaster like flood or fire or earthquake I would be able to salvage up to the previous month. Just wish I could do the same for the books!

I've heard this from other students that finished their PhD and are now faculty.  Keep all the books. It is a requirement for a professor to have an office full of books, and who knows you might need them to teach or do future research.

Quit PhD as I'm entering 3rd year?
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======= Date Modified 23 Sep 2010 21:25:36 =======
Hi!  I just posted a thread yesterday about my situation which is the opposite of yours.

I'm in month 37 of what I planned to be a four-year PhD in Education. I really want to finish the PhD.  Love the research and tinkering around with ideas and stuff, but have had a very unresponsive and unsupportive supervisor (who took a year's sabbatical and was incommunicado during that time) plus a committee member who doubted her abilities to understand what I was writing about. I was supposed to have finished my comp exams by August 31, 2010. 

Well, that day has come and gone and now I've been asked to withdraw because everyone on my committee resigned because I had asked for either a six-month extension to finish the comps or a leave of absence to get my act together. As we all know not having a supervisor is basically a death knell.  So I guess I am the opposite of you. I love the program and doing the research and feeling like I will make a contribution to society and academia, not to mention being able to teach education students when I am finished.  But them how can I do that without a PhD? So naturally I'm totally stressed out, crying all the time, eating bags of potato chips and gaining weight as we speak since no one at the department wants to help me figure something out.  It's withdraw now. Tough shit. Thanks for your money and wasting our time.

I hope you have found a resolution to your situation.  I've yet to find mine. Sometimes I wonder why academia makes it so difficult to try and work things out whether someone wants to drop out or stay and finish.