It was 6th October last year when I finally received the email from my Graduate School saying that my examiners were happy with my thesis amendments and I was officially all done and dusted. 6 months on, I’ve had time to reflect on the PhD, my experiences during it and Read more…
Once you get towards the end of your PhD, you’re probably a little sick and tired of explaining it to people. Especially in social situations, where you already feel terribly guilty for not writing, and just want to drink tea/coffee/beer and not think about your thesis for one little second. Read more…
I’m (please please) very close to finishing my PhD. I’m also a runner, borne partly out of a need to let off steam and give my brain a rest when thesis work got too much, which it frequently does. I enjoy that running gives me different experiences to academic work: predominantly Read more…
December is now well and truly upon us, which means that we are bombarded with twinkly trees, chocolate overdoses and songs with too many jingly bells. For those of us working on a thesis over the festive period, it can be hard not to get distracted by all the shiny Read more…
Whilst doing a PhD occupies an almost definite and unrelenting full-time amount of headspace, it doesn’t necessarily have to take up the physical hours of a full-time job. Many people do their PhDs part-time and work alongside, or some people get jobs during the writing up and corrections stage when Read more…
Recently I lamented about the difficulty of fitting PhD amends around a full time job and life. Well, I’ve found the solution: quit your job and move city. So obvious, right?! It almost sounds like I’m trying to run from my corrections, doesn’t it. In fact it is the complete Read more…
I have at one time or another, been on every side of a PhD viva. In about 4 months time I’ll be in another one, watching one of my students hopefully produce a vigorous defence of his thesis. Which is good because I’ve read the thesis and it certainly needs Read more…
Update: By popular demand this blog post is now available as a downloadable PDF. Last week, I had the always very enjoyable experience of marking MSc theses. This year I had 5 to mark in a week – which was about all I could manage without burning out. But as I Read more…
What seems like an age ago (October last year) I finished my PhD and submitted my thesis for examination (a month before my deadline 🙂 ). Then after a shocking 8 months (no idea why it took that long…) I had my viva, which went quite well and I thankfully Read more…
So, last week I had my viva, where I presented my thesis on “Fibre-optics sensors with molecule coatings”. It was, if you can believe it, quite good fun and I thought it might be helpful to share a blow-by-blow account of how it went. So below is as detailed an Read more…