I'm half way through the final year of my humanities PhD and I seem to be doing less work than any of the proceeding years, while remaining on schedule to complete. I mean I feel as though this should be the most work but it has been fairly relaxed. Maybe it was just the "hype" surrounding the 3rd year... I just want to ask if anyone else feels this way? If so, are you on course for completion? And what is your school of research.

Kind regards

Hi,
I'm only coming to the end of my first year but, from what I've gathered, the final year may not be the worst for Humanities students PROVIDED they've been focused and writing consistently throughout. In my (humanities) dept at least, some people seem to put off drafting chapters for as long as possible. Obviously this is will delay them further on.

I think that with Social Sciences / Hard Sciences your time frame is very much determined by your data collection / experiments and this can delay the writing up process until the final year(s), leading to a very tight race to the finish.

So, I don't think you should be worried that your task seems manageable. Instead you can be proud that you worked hard from the beginning.

(up):-)

I'm almost at the end of my second year, data collection almost finished. I keep thinking it can only get harder, so it's quite nice to read that that isn't always the case. I've written conceptual, literature and methodology chapters already so my work is writing the findings and pulling it all together. I'm more concerned about keeping motivated through corrections and drafts!

The final year was tough for me because 1/ I was bored and at the end of my tether with my topic and 2/ my supervisor just got me to re-write re-write re-write time after time after time until it got back to the original version - so it was demoralising and was a tough battle, but basically it was just editing.

Yeah I agree that this does have a lot to do with the humanities, but I find it interesting nonetheless. However, when my supervisors read my full draft I might just have a lot more work to do :$