hi all,
Im a part-time, self funded, registered PhD research candidate and am on the 3rd Year (officially) of my PhD track. Personally I work fully time, but have less hours during the summer months and I also have two children under 5. I am at the stage where I am approaching my transfer to the 'official' PhD registration that will hopefully follow a scheduled interview/presentation in late summer or early autumn. I have submitted a first draft of my lit Review and have been working on the corrections before I proceed to do the Lit review of the next area of interest for my research.

However, my dad suddenly passed away two weeks ago and my head is all over the place. I have spent the last two weeks trying to get my head around the shock and grief as well as trying to help/support and be around my mother. There has been no time to do anything research related and to be honest I cant see this situation changing in the next few weeks at the very least. I have also considered just walking away from the research altogether given the suddenness of my dads passing... but I do realize that these thoughts are not really being based upon a clear head.

I am looking for people to advise me on how to approach this as I have just sent in a report on my progress over the course of the last year, as it had to be submitted by next week, but I feel now that I rushed through over the last few days and its nowhere near representative of my academic capabilities. I would approach my supervisor but they are off campus at the minute and I too am out of the country for two weeks from next week to try and have some family time.
As you can probably guess I'm a little all over the place and am even unsure if any advice can be given here... but if anyone has any advice please feel free to pass it on either here or through a PM.
THANKS

Hi all,
been registered as a part time PhD student and have been at it for coming on 2.5 years. My transfer is coming up the end of the summer and I have to say at the moment im really struggling to get through the work load. I cover about 8-9 hours a week as Im busy working full time and have two small children that occupy my weekends. Realistically, fridays are my productive day with a little bit done during the week. By the time I get in from work its usually 6.30, dinner and getting kids to bed brings me up to 8.30 and then Im shattered. I do have the summers off and the last two have been treating the Phd as a job and dedicating around 35-40hours a week to it. Im looking for tips and/or advice on how to be more productive, currently im working on a lit review of a section that will constitute 10k words, of which im up to 6k with a couple more bits of literature to review.
As i saw any links, tips, advice etc for a part-time PhD student in the field of sociology/communications studies would be greatly appreciated. Re: my research field, its very interesting to me and will be using ethnographic methodologies when I actually get to the empirical research.
Please feel free to contribute in any way possible
Thanks