I am fast approaching the final year of my PhD (come the 1st of September it will be official). The past two years have flown by so incredibly quickly. When I realised that September would be the beginning of the end I started to get into a bit of a panic; how on earth am I going to finish? So, I sat down, had a cup of tea and came up with a strategy for my last week as a second year and for the final stint…
1) Sit down and spend a good amount of time going through what I have done already
2) Work out what is a) Useful and finished b) Useless and rubbish c) Useful but needs finishing off d) What is missing
3) Put a plan together to finish the unfinished and tackle the missing bits
4) Put a realistic, priority focused timeline together on what I want to acheive and by when – I don’t want to try and do too much and end up not finishing any of it. What parts are essential and what is ‘nice to have’?
5) Start putting a plan of attack together for the thesis writing…
I am interested to know why people fail to write up their PhD. Please share any reasons you know of or have experienced, all the better if you can share how you overcame them!
I just had a chat with my colleague who is about to finish his 3rd year. His opinion is that one motive that people fail their viva is that at certain point on your research you’re so tired and just want to finish it that you might ‘check in’ before having everything right.
But another observation is that mainly, people who submit the final thesis will probably pass. The problem is with the others that just quit. We don’t have much information about those, they just desapear.