Good morning!

I had a meeting with my supervisor yesterday which was great. Is it just me or does anyone else find that supervisor meetings are amazing for clearing your mind and refocusing? Either way, we've got another meeting planned for next week and I know exactly what my priorities are right now.

1) Draft the first half of chapter 4 so we can discuss it next week
2) Repeat a couple of experiments for chapter 5 (should be the last ones for chapter 5!)
3) Tidy up and edit first draft of chapter 5 ready to let supervisor see it

tanemahuta: Thanks. I definitely seem to be going for the bury myself in work approach. Productive days seem to be better! Hope chapter 5 is going well. 50 days to go must be quite the motivation!

wanderingbrit: Wow. That's the sort of surprise that would send me crazy! Whenever people visited when I was younger the first question would be "when are you leaving?" just because I liked to know what was happening!

Hope everyone's having a good week so far!

Hello,

I know I've not posted much recently, but with typically wonderful timing I've been hit with a break up. Yay. So anyway, back to the PhD. Today I'm going to go into the lab and start working through my last experiments.

So far I've finished the first drafts of a couple of my results chapters, so need to get these results so I can write up the rest of them. Definitely need to get a draft of the introduction sorted soon too.

You all sound like you're doing really well, so keep it up and good luck!

Wow! Well done Caterpillar27! I'm currently waiting to hear back about a paper we've submitted and one I've sent to my supervisor so pretty tense right now!

Today I was doing some of my last minute experiments (I've got a bit of a list that has suddenly cropped up, but actually I quite like having a couple of days a week in the lab - I think it's helping keep me sane!)

Tomorrow I have to convert lots of results to graphs so I can start getting that subchapter written. Hoping to at least get some bullet points in place so I know what I want to write for each section.

Tanemahuta - I'm so impressed that you're planning a wedding and writing up!

Good luck to everyone for tomorrow! :)

This week hasn't been as productive as I hoped it would be. I've been back in the lab running some last minute experiments and working on various sections but not really finished anything. Positive thoughts though - progress is progress even if it is hopelessly disorganised. Now I just have to reorganise myself ready to get on with writing tomorrow morning!

Hope you're all doing ok and hurrah for days that actually feel like summer! :)

Hello,

The plan for today:
1: Make some changes to a paper we want to submit soon.
2: Finish an introduction section that's currently sitting around half-written.

It's going to be a tying up loose ends sort of day. Hope your work goes well!

Hello,

I'd like to join in with that. My deadline is also September and it's terrifying how much I seem to have left to do!

My undergrads have finished too now so I can actually get on with things. It was my job to supervise them in the lab and for the last few weeks before Easter they were all very busy getting their projects finished! I'm back in the lab this week trying to get another chapter's last bits of labwork finished off!

How is it all going? I am so stressed with undergraduates stealing all my time at the moment. Luckily they'll be gone next week and then I can really crack on with my work again!

I'm not panicking yet either, but I've realised it doesn't actually seem real yet. I think my subconscious believes I'm just going to be pottering around the lab forever. I've got one results chapter finished and submitted as a paper, then there's one I'm writing now, and two more that I've still got too much lab work to finish up on. I've been dabbling with my introduction too when I don't feel like working on my chapter so that's slowly starting to take some sort of very vague beginnings of a shape!

Touching bases on progress sounds like a nice idea. It's good to know that I'm not the only one with too much left to do (hopefully that doesn't sound too mean)!

Hello there fellow PhD people. I was just wondering if anyone else here is aiming to submit over the summer? I've got a very vague June/July deadline and I'm feeling slightly horrified how much I have left to do!

Button - That sounds rather annoying but at least it's done now and you can move on.
Batfink - It sounds like they had sensible reasons for not giving you the job and that feedback sounds lovely.

Today I've been preparing for a supervisor meeting, having a supervisor meeting, and now I'm preparing a report for some people that we're collaborating with. Hurrah!

Hello,

From what I've heard (and I'm not submitting for another 6 months so I'm only going on what I've heard from other people in my department) finding a job before you submit can be quite tricky as whether (and when) you get the PhD is dependent on the results of the viva so people don't always want to employ you before you finish anyway (although apparently this is more of an issue if you're looking for industry jobs rather than a postdoc).

As others have said, it's quite worrying that he doesn't seem to respect your career and ambitions. Your career is probably going to be stressful enough without having to defend yourself to your boyfriend. Tbh this actually makes me quite angry and I think some other people have already given you good advice so I probably shouldn't comment further.

Personally I don't think that your friend should feel obliged to follow her husband everywhere he goes, but again, for me this is quite a sensitive issue. My boyfriend went straight into work from uni and is a few years older and therefore is making buckets of money, is ridiculously successful, and is travelling all over the place for work so we're currently long distance, and unless I magically manage to find a postdoc where he's moving to next (because that's already been decided) we're probably going to be long distance for quite a bit longer. Much as I'd love to be with him, I know that if I put my career second to his I'll end up resenting him and having very little respect for myself. Really it's down to her and what she'd be happiest doing, but if he's going to choose where to take a job without allowing compromise, then he should be prepared for her to choose what she wants to do. One person making all the comromises just isn't fair.

Sorry if that got a bit ranty. :p

I think to me the difference is that posting about writing articles / reading articles / writing chapters is stuff that everyone has to do and is therefore easy to identify with. Anyway, today I am running an experiment to help with investigating a puzzling result from last week. I'm trying same solvent/related complex to see whether I see the same behaviour. Exciting stuff!

Hope everyone is having a lovely Friday! :)

Hello,

Not been here for a while (mostly because I've been doing lab work and just saying "doing some experiments" doesn't seem very interesting for anyone else :p ) so I hope everyone's work is going ok.

I'm having a bit of a panic because I've realised I only have just over 6 months until I should be handing in and I still have a lot of experiments I want to get done. Finishing in time has never looked more terrifying. Trying to organise all of my old experiments so I can start writing as I go. I think I need a poster with "Don't Panic" written on it in large, friendly letters!

I think I fail at mytomatoes - it's great when I'm not feeling motivated, but tasks don't always seem to fit neatly into the time slots - if I've finished reading a paper I don't really want to start another with 5 minutes to go. Somtimes I just get to the point where I'm just happy getting on with it and end up skipping through all of the breaks or carry on and don't realise for ages that I forgot to click that I started work again.