Hi

How do people organise their time researching on a part-time basis?

How much time a day do you spend researching - and on what activities - and how many days a week?

N

Hey,

I cannot speak on a basis of someone who did his/her PhD in part-time way as I was doing it on full-time basis. All I can say is it depends on the research that you are going to do and how much invested you are on it. For me, I had to spend almost 18 months for sample collection as the samples I was collecting were rare (cancer samples). I also had to spend two months to troubleshoot the problems that occurred with methodology that I used to get the meaningful results for the research I was doing. Also, almost 8 months for data collection inside the lab (including the period when my experiments failed). Hence sample collection + getting the results + data analysis took me 2 years and a half to finish. After that, I took 8 months to write the thesis because my supervisor was busy doing her book to make me wait longer to get feedback from her regarding PhD drafts that I wrote. So I spent almost 4 years from starting PhD and submission of thesis. This 4 years of course did not include the buffering period that I had to endure waiting for PhD viva and correction afterwards.

how many days a week (researching)?
-Depends. For my case, my supervisor wanted me to be in the lab before 8 am and leave after 5 pm (weekdays) and come back whenever I want during weekend. Of course most of the time I come at 7 am and leave at 6pm ( depending on whether I finish the lab works earlier or not). All this time didn't include writing manuscripts and reading articles from journals which I always spent 2 hours at home