(Part 2 of 10)

Okay, assuming we’ve assuaged the overwhelming sense of panic the next thing to talk about relates to the formatting of the thesis.

By the time you’re in the third year of the PhD you should be sleeping with your institution’s guide to formatting/presenting/preparing a thesis under your pillow. This booklet, or similar, is the essential guide to how things must be done. Your faculty or department may also have a similar publication. Read this thoroughly until you know what is required in terms of the layout, sections, margins, line spacing, and bibliographic and citation requirements etc. And if you don’t understand something then find out as soon as possible. Don’t wait until you’re printing the final draft to discover you’ve mucked something up. (For example, the University of Auckland booklet is here).

Next, there is often support from your Student Learning Centre or equivalent. I did a workshop of formatting your thesis which was really helpful, even thought I was a competent user of a word processor for academic writing. There was also a workshop on how to bring all the different parts of the thesis together for submission. Again useful to make sure you haven’t forgotten something. (For example, University of Auckland – Centre for Academic Development – Postgraduates).

The university also provided a thesis template for MS Word that had a set of styles that matched the university’s guidelines. Really useful, and once I started writing early on with only those styles and document formatting then I really didn’t have to worry about whether I was going to have to do major edits for formatting later. Write everything in the styles the final draft will use – then you won’t have problems with formatting cut-and-paste issues later.

It was really helpful because it helped me to see how big (physically) a chapter would finally be, as well as how many words fitted on a page and what the footnotes etc. looked like in reality.

Also, set your reference/citation/bibliographic style in concrete early on and in accordance with what’s recommended for your department and faculty. Far better to get that sorted now than trying to do it later (even with bibliographic tools like EndNote).

I’d also recommend going to the library and getting out a selection of theses from your discipline to have a look at. What did people write in their abstracts, acknowledgements and prefaces? What did you like about how some theses were formatted? What didn’t you like? It helps to see what the finished product looks like – though a bit daunting too.

Oh, and make sure you really understand how big the thesis is meant to be. I found that the PhD guidelines said 100,000 words in one place and the also said between 250-300 pages. Depending on the citation style you pick and whether you’re a heavy footnoter you may find that 100,000 words won’t really fit into 250-300 pages. So you need to check which one is the real limit.

Finally, track down a good thesis proofreader. You may need to pay for one, but if you can find a good one (and I did) who can pick up not just typos but also grammar then strive to keep them. Also, don’t wait for the final draft if possible. If they’ll take early material in pieces then go with that – then your supervisor’s time reading your work can be focused on the content and you avoid overloading the proofreader with a last minute panic.

See also: PHD Comics: Thesis submission, pt. 3

(Part 1 of 10)

When faced with the perceived enormity of finishing the thesis (N.B. the thesis by this stage is often referred to in less polite terms), it is not unreasonable to experience varying degrees of panic. However, while some manner of concern over finishing the thesis and indeed feeling pressure to finish are useful motivators, panic is not your friend. Neither is excessive stress.

So, sit down and work out exactly what has to be done and when it has to be done by. Take into account all the other commitments you have to family, other people, work, your own health etc, and break the path to finishing down into bite-sized, manageable chunks. This is helpful because:

1. You can identify what is critical to finishing and thereby ignore things that look important but are actually distractions.
2. Each mini-section or task you complete helps to affirm you’re on the right track.
3. You know when in the day you do different types of work well and can select (within reason) the right type of work to do. For example, I don’t concentrate well straight after lunch (1-3pm) so I’d do thesis tasks then that required less concentration. The best times to write for me are 10am-12pm and 4pm-8pm (which never worked out with family life). Sure you need to work whenever you can but try to work smarter.
4. You get an idea of how long particular tasks take, such as revising an established piece of writing or checking a set of references, so you can estimate how long other tasks might take (allowing for the fact that they always take longer than you think).

At this stage it’s all about grinding it out. You know your stuff, the thesis structure is pretty much set in stone, and it’s just plod, plod, plod until it’s done. There is no other way.

One other thing. Related to the feelings of panic are also feelings of guilt about how much you haven’t done, and the perception that you mucked around in the first two years and should have worked harder. Perhaps, but things that took weeks then now take hours or days because you’ve become immersed in the material for so long and have thought researchy-type thoughts for longer. The worst case scenario is that the guilty feeling gets in the way of getting finished, as you wallow around in it for a while. You are where you are, acknowledge that you might have been able to be further along, also acknowledge that you know more now than then, and then get on and finish anyway.

See PHD Comics: Time to end this

Making sure you’re getting regular exercise and contact with other people helps both with managing the panic and guilt stuff. It may help to have an ‘academic confessor’ (not your supervisor necessarily) to vent to – I had one or two from time to time and it was useful to get my head straight in the thesis process.

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.