By Jane Judge |
Finishing your thesis, for most of the time that you’re a PhD student, feels like it won’t happen. When you’re not actually finishing up, advice about the end tends to go in one ear and out the other. Four years ago, I certainly felt like I would not need to worry about what to do at the end for ages. I simply couldn’t visualize it. And yet, the time will come when you are finally—dun, dun, dun—finishing up! It’s exhilarating, exhausting, terrifying, and thrilling all at once. There are also annoying elements. (How many times can you read one paragraph? You don’t know until you’ve begun doing ‘final’ edits to your dissertation.) With this in mind, I offer some reflections and nuggets of advice regarding The End.
In the midst of editing and exhausted – that’s my version, and corrections from both supervisors that I’m attempting to merge into one!
It takes A LOT longer than you think. The full draft that makes you quite happy (and rightly so) when you complete it, is the first of many rough drafts. Once you’ve put the whole thing together, new issues arise. Suddenly you realize you’ve explained something differently or too many times in different chapters, or you find some blatant contradiction that you’d never seen between chapters 2 and 5. Then, you’ll need to wait for feedback from your advisors, which will mostly likely be infinitely useful but may not be as quick as you’d hope. After all, though it consumes your life, they have plenty of other things to read and take care of. Then there’s the copy editing that is not difficult but can become quite time consuming. Who knew it could take 3 days to get footnotes spic and span?? After submission, you wait for your viva date. Once that’s set, you still have to actually wait for the viva (this can be up to 4 months). Then you will probably have some kind of corrections to do (typos still count as corrections and none of us are perfect!), not to mention the fact that the College Senate needs to officially meet to approve the recommendations from your examining board. ‘Tis a formality, but we know how academe likes its formalities. And, of course, binding and printing takes 24 hours. Lastly, it takes the College office 3-5 days to get your award letter issued. Overall, from full draft to award letter from the College, it took my thesis about nine months. No wonder some people refer to them as our children!
There are a lot of ‘endings’. For me, the first was getting that full draft done, all my chapters in one glorious, gargantuan word document. (Top tip: use ‘sections’ so that you can easily format and create a table of contents.) Giving a full draft I was happy with to my supervisors was another little milestone. Submission to the College office is a BIG one—for me, the one with the most cathartic effect. That’s the ‘finally!’ moment (and FB photo). Then the viva feels like an ‘ending’ – I know my results! I have met academic standards and will graduate! (Yes, there are other options, but if you’ve gotten to that stage, anything that doesn’t lead to graduation, no matter how many months into the future, is unlikely.) Getting corrections done is an ending. Seeing your thesis printed and bound is perhaps the most ‘fun’ moment, but the true ‘I am finished’ feeling arrives when you get that letter from the College that says your thesis has been accepted and you will be awarded your PhD at the next graduation. Huzzah!
Final submission. They give you a lollipop!
The viva is a pleasant opportunity. This is perhaps easier to say from this side of things, but I felt quite excited going into my viva, and I’d love it if every PhD student could go into it feeling that way. At that point, you have given your all, done what you could, and submitted something that you are happy with. Whatever the outcome, the viva is your chance to talk about your work for an extended period with people who have actually read it! You get to dive into specifics, talk about avenues for further research, and defend choices you’ve made. Even if you don’t get a pass with no corrections, the viva is a professional setting—no examiner is going to personally attack you or humiliate you (there’s a person in the room who’s tasked with making sure that doesn’t happen, in fact). You’ve had a break from the thesis, so the viva also isn’t flush with anxieties about all the things you’ve been reading or how hard that paragraph was to craft. You’ve had weeks away from the thing and can feel proud of what you’ve done. Embrace that. The viva is truly YOUR moment.
Some practical advice:
1) Keep your bibliography up to date. Not doing this was perhaps my biggest regret – learn from my mistake!
2) Keep your footnotes easy to change. Put in your Ibids at the end.
3) Keep versions well-organized. Whatever method works best for you, make sure you know which edition of Chapter 6 you’re working with.
4) Read through the entire thing. At least once, just read through it in order.
5) Have an editing team. Different people pick up on different things, so use this to your advantage.
6) Walk away every so often. Yes, even when you’re finishing.
7) Save print credit so that you can get two versions printed for submission. I HIGHLY recommend the Teviot Print shop – info here: http://www.teviotprintshop.com Super quick, very reasonable prices, incredibly convenient location, and nice guys!
Finishing your thesis is an amazing feeling. It’s also terrifying. ‘What if it’s not perfect?!’ is the hardest hurdle to finally printing and submitting. You spend so much time working toward that moment, but then suddenly it’s as if you don’t want to let it go. Be prepared to be overwhelmed, at least once. You will have a crisis moment of some kind. When it comes, breathe through it and know that you can do this – you’ve gotten this far!
Jane Judge has just completed her PhD on the Belgian revolution of 1787-1790 at the University of Edinburgh and will graduate in June 2015. She has been awarded a post-doc through the Belgian American Education Foundation, which she will carry out at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, beginning in January 2016. She tweets at the handle @JaneJune.
(Images 1 & 3 © Jane Judge, Image 2 © Belinda Washington)
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