Wildfalcon

I seem to know a whole host of people, and veritable league in fact, of people who are finishing their PhD as I type this. This causes me no end of joy, daily tormenting them, asking how many words they wrote today (so far numbers like 200 look pretty good). However I remember when I was in the same position, and what helped me. So here are my top tips for finishing your PhD.

Spend some time each morning just writing
Unless you already have all the words you need, each morning, set aside 30 minutes to just write down text. Don’t worry if its good text, and certainty do NOT allow yourself to stop and thing “this is crap” just generate text. You can tidy it up later, but doing this will soon get your word count up to where it should be. Whatever you do, do not stop and ask yourself why your word count isn’t already where it should be – that way leads to madness.

Don’t worry about corrections
Its very rare to get no corrections, if your thesis is one of the few that gets no corrections at all, if your spending your time going though making the whole thing really shine, then your well into the territory of diminishing returns. This is not an excuse to do a bad job, or a sloppy thesis. But don’t forget that often examiners will see things from a different perspective, and want a different view, or an edge case you missed to be considered in addition to what you have already done. I know your thinking you can never survive another few months making corrections, but you can, and in a year’s time when you look back, and realise how much better your thesis is because of it – you will be glad the examiner asked for the corrections

Set yourself a deadline if one isn’t imposed on you
This will force you to make the hard decisions about what to write up, and what to leave out. You will (I hope) have done a lot of work by now, and you want to put it all in, but does it all add to the central message of your thesis? If something is adjunct to your main message, leave it out. I left out an entire journal paper from my thesis (after the examiners pointed out to be that it was irrelevant).

Leave time for binding it
Even though you often get to submit at least one electronic copy now – for the time being you still have to submit a bound copy. Every college has its own, often strange, and always pedantic rules about how to bind it. What size the lettering can be, what colour the 7th page must be. Submitting your thesis is a stressful time, and faffing about with stupid binding regulations is something you are going to want to take a little bit of time over – just to convince yourself you got it right

And finally
Submit the thesis when its ready – not when you are ready
Your thesis will be good enough to pass before you are psychologically convinced of this. This is pretty much guaranteed. You have spent such a long part of your life working on this, and you just have to get it right. If your normal (probably not if your doing a PhD) then you’re scared its going to fail, and you want to keep polishing it and making it better. Listen to your supervisor – its what they are there for (even if its all they are there for). They look bad if they tell you to submit before its ready – so once they say submit – submit it already!