I’ve been asked to speak later on this month to the third+ year theology PhD students on that last year or so of getting the PhD thesis to submission (and beyond). The university’s Student Learning Centre has lots of resources and tutorials to walk PhD students through the process of writing, research and formatting etc. so I want to add to the material that they (should) have already seen.

I’ve decided to do a quick Top 10 things that came out of my PhD journey and to help that process over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging them here to help get them straight in my head before the actual meeting. I also figure they might be useful to other students outside of that group, though the discipline you’re involved in will have specific requirements that will shape thesis development.

My current Top 10 list is:

1. Don’t Panic!
2. Doing it with style
3. Practice makes perfect
4. A footnote in history
5. You have backed up your work, haven’t you?
6. Supervisors are people too
7. Reading. Just say No!
8. Thesis trajectory
9. Finding my own voice
10. Finish or else!

I’ll expand on each of these in later posts.