Part time PhD - how to finish?

[Leskovac]

Can I please ask for some moral support and/or tips on how to finish this damned thing, please? I have a full time management job in an academic department, two young children, and I am in the fifth and final year of a part time PhD.

Doing a PhD was longstanding dream, and I was given an opportunity that I could not turn down. I can't honestly say I regret taking it up, but the price has been high in terms of family life and my own health and wellbeing. I sometimes feel like the bloke who has an obsession about climbing Everest and everyone else pays the price.

I am hoping I will look back on it and it will have been worth it (and worth it for my family), but the longer it goes on the harder it gets. I am struggling to identify my core arguments and contribution. Other people's theses seem either brilliant or boring, and either way don't help me work out how to focus and what might be good enough.

Any tips on how to get it over the line? I like writing and I don't usually have a problem with procrastination - I just don't know how to do this!

You might be in the valley of shit:

thesiswhisperer.com/2012/05/08/the-valley-of-shit/amp/

Ha!!! I love it!!!

All right, I clearly have to get over myself and knuckle down.

Thanks for all the pointers, really appreciate it 😍

I did my PhD full time and felt swamped, so hats off to you managing to do it while holding down a job and raising a family! Sounds like you're doing really well. Could you spend two chapter following each of your two potential paths, or wouldn't that work with your research?

My main advice to students at that stage is the old ‘A good dissertation is a done dissertation. A great dissertation is a published dissertation. A perfect dissertation is neither.’. So yes, articulating your knowledge contribution is important but it doesn’t have to be the big revolution. An incremental step in understanding is fine.

Are you in a position where you could book some cheap holiday accommodation for a week, a few long weekends, and just focus on getting it done?
I did this to finish my masters research report. Granted you need money for the accommodation and someone that can look after the kids. I acknowledge a PHD thesis is bigger than a masters research report!
You are so close to the finish line, you got this far, you can do it 💪

Sorry, I didn't actually read your thread, whoops, but I still hope my suggestion of booking yourself breaks to do focused work on your PHD is useful.

Seems you are getting stuck in a thought loop you can't break out of to make progress?

Also seems like you are focusing on ensuring you create the highest 'value' in the research you produce.

One thing we were taught when I did my 'research methods' subject prior to my masters thesis is negative, or null, results in your research is still a valid result. You may prevent a future PHD student going down the same path and lead them to a different path of research and outcomes people can collectively learn from.

So many people have done research and not cured cancer, but all that research has assisted people that have.

Take moral judgement out of what is a 'worthy' topic or research outcome. Part of a PHD is proving you can follow a methodical scientifically valid research process, so if you work in academia, you have those research skills to guide others.

At this point, 5 years in, you just need to get it done for practical reasons, to keep your job etc.

Stop judging yourself, lean on your mentors for advice and feedback and keep making small steps that move you forward. Break it down into chunks if the finish line looks too distant and too difficult to reach.

Most importantly of all, be kind to yourself 💐

If it's any help, I found with my thesis - which used qualitative data - that the key question was what to leave out in terms of findings. You don't need to talk about everything, but the results chapters do need to build on each other to make a cohesive argument.

To that extent, the process felt more like sculpture, where I removed extraneous material to show the structure, rather than ceramics where you add material to build the form - if that metaphor works!

You probably have numerous topics or angles you could write results chapters on. Could you spend some time writing a couple of lines on each idea and trying to group them together in coherent groups? You only need three or four results chapters. Tpi will probably find some topics will fit more naturally together, and these can form your thesis - your argument.

If you can do that at the results writing stages, it makes the process of writing the intro and discussion more straightforward because you don't have to reverse engineer what you think the links are between the chapters at that point.

I should add that my actual moment of insight was very anticlimactic.

I had three concepts on post it notes, that I had arranged it into a triangle and thought. 'Okay, results chapter 1 is about the links between concepts A and B, I know that. Results chapter 2 is shaping up to be about the links between B and C. Huh, I guess results chapters 3 could be about the links between A and C, that would work. And then the discussion would talk about what it means to bring these three ideas together. That's it then.'

It was very much a feeling of 'oh, that's obvious' but it took years to get there😂 After that I still had to write about 2/3 of it, but at least I knew the direction I was going.

Thanks again for all these ideas - it's really helpful to see other perspectives.

I think GreenSmithing's tip about sculpting may be the next step - I've got so hung up on the need to focus, and the competing instinct to read more and open up more possible themes, that I haven't set everything I already have out in front of me. I'll try cutting away from that and see if a shape emerges. Then I can follow all the other good advice about chapter summaries, grinding away at it, etc.

namechangealerttt - thanks for the suggestion about getting away, and I know people who have done this and it's worked well for them. It's hard for me to get away from my other commitments, and I need to reserve the time, money and goodwill for going to the occasional conference or seminar visit, but maybe if I am still in this position in a year's time (I hope not, eek) I will be able to justify it.

For large writing projects I do post its like @GreenSmithing . Write a fact (I’m a scientist) or a section of your argument I guess for you on each note. You will have hundreds. Dedicate a table or a pinboard to putting them all in order into what you think will be chapters. Then, I always narrate a pretend PowerPoint presentation in my head for that chapter explaining to people what my findings are. I suppose the 1-2 page summary doc someone else suggested above is exactly the same process. Move or Chuck any post its that don’t fit well. Write!

(I take a photo of them at each stage to prevent me thinking ‘oh shit the last version was better’)

Watching with interest as I am also doing a part-time social sciences PhD, in my late forties. I am about a year behind you and am beginning my data analysis.

In some ways I am free of much of the pressure as I have no particular interest in going into academia - I have an established career in another sector - it was just something that I wanted to achieve. I do still really enjoy that I am doing it.

Some useful links already shared on this thread.

My only tip is that I keep stress levels low by never really looking at the whole thing - like the sun, don’t ever look directly at it! I only ever focus on the next bit that needs to be done. But perhaps that’s a bit harder in the later stages…

Good luck to you, MaybeDoctor!

I know I won't ever be a "classical" academic either (for a whole lot of reasons, including my stage of life and also the constraints of doing a PhD like this mean you can't get experience in things like teaching), and I am mainly also doing this because I want to.

When I started I was hoping it might open doors to slightly different roles in Higher Education and it's possible that might still happen, but it's seeming less and less likely, with everything that is going on in the sector. I am lucky in that I have a decent management job that I won't lose if I don't get a PhD (it might become untenable for other reasons).

I hope you continue to enjoy it!

You have got this @Leskovac

A very kind supervisor once handed me a tissue to dry my eyes and then made me write 'tell a story' on a post it note to stick above my screen, on one of the times I hit completely lost writing up. That was in the mid-1980's. I still have a post it with that message above my desk and it still gets me through some of the hard times.

Remember also that no one (yet) knows about all your research so what has become 'known', familiar and no longer 'fresh and new' to you is still 'unknown' to them.

This writing is your opportunity to tell your story. Have at it and All the best.

Thanks, FinallyHere, that does sound really kind, and nice of you to pass it on 😍

I have a sign above my screen written by one of my children a couple of years ago saying, "I am not telling you it will be easy, I am telling you it will be worth it". I wish I could say she wrote it for me, but I think she was just writing out something she'd heard at school.

I took circa 8 years. Wrote majority in last few months on very structured tImetable, very very early, every morning.
some great advice above - Rowena Murray does a thesis endgame course and her books are all good, too. There is a good podcast called the PhD Liferaft and some good interviews on there

keep going!!! 💪🏻

Thank you very much. Another mention of Rowena Murray, and our library has her eBooks.....

@AlwaysColdHands
I’m interested to know a bit more about your journey, if you’re happy to share? For example, were you working while this was in progress? Did you find the daily writing exhausting or was it ok once you got into it?

I am part-time and starting to get to the point where some of my full time peers are in their final year, so I wonder how you found the peer-group side of things in the later stages?

@MaybeDoctor I worked full time throughout and had to suspend study once during the duration of my PhD. Unfortunately due to workload and family responsibilities I didn’t/ couldn’t engage in the communities of other peers studying (eg research seminars etc) so it was very lonely. I definitely could have got so much more out of the process if I’d been able to participate.
Throughout, I very much worked by picking it up for a few weeks intensely then shelving it again for long periods of time. Not ideal but necessary.
min the end I wrote about the last 50,000 words in the last few months. I’m someone e who works to deadlines though, and kind of relished the challenge. I know I can be incredibly disciplined if it’s for a fairly short determined period of time. Everyone’s different!

Hello again, I am coming back to this thread as it helped me last time. Thanks for all the tips - they did unlock something in my head, and I was able to decide where to go for the third data chapter.

But my goodness this is slow. I looked at the date of my OP and it was 15 months ago. I thought I was pretty close, and in a sense I was, but I have also come a long way since then and I am still not finished.

The timeline has been:

November 24 - post on here, feeling stuck about the shape of my thesis.
Spring term 25 - figure out last data chapter
June 25 - progress review (the only one I have actually had other than my upgrade - got great advice)
Summer 25 - early draft of all chapters, stuck together into a single document for the first time (incoherent, inconsistent voice, patchy literature review and conclusions)
Autumn term/Christmas 25 - reworking based on supervisors' feedback, positioning work more clearly, making everything more consistent and hang together.
January 26 - finish literature review while waiting for feedback on second draft. I am pretty sure there will still be some rewriting/repositioning - it won't just be edits.

I REALLY need to finish this academic year, for my health and family life. Can someone give me hope it is possible? Any tips on how to work most effectively on what I hope is the last lap?

Thanks in advance for any advice...

If you're that far in, of course you can finish this academic year!

I’m guessing it feels like an insurmountable task right now. ‘Finishing’ is a big big thing but why not break it down into smaller tasks. At
this stage I got myself a lovely new notebook (very important) and I went through the thesis page by page and wrote down what needed doing with the page number. I would then choose what to complete based on how much time and energy I had. Some days it was reformatting a graph and other days rewriting a section of a chapter. It really helped me as I felt I had some control and as I ticked things off I could see the end coming.

You can do this. A PhD is an epic accomplishment that takes real grit to get through. You’ve made it this far, you can get to the finish line.

Remember it does not need to be perfect. Many people have minor corrections after viva and it can be easier to make the changes the examiners specifically ask for than to endlessly edit before submitting.

OK.

Assuming you have your chapters in the order you want them. You start constructing the narrative. You make sure that the end and start of each chapter sums up what went before and leads the reader forward.

You have a THESIS - a story which you want to tell in a coherent and compelling way.

THIS is the problem, this is the background and what others have said / done about it (if they have), this is the crux of my contribution, this is what I have demonstrated and why it is an important contribution to my field.

If you are sure that the chapter order is sorted then you begin to drop in phrases like (eg in Ch4) "...having shown in Ch3 that Y is the case, of course the added complication is Z. This will be addressed in the section on Future directions in Ch 7..."

You want to get the coherent narrative straight in your mind at this point and make sure that you signpost throughout. You're making an argument, you have to make sure the examiners remember what you've already said and you head of any "but what about?" thoughts they might have while reading it.

I found that once I did that process the final edits were easier because it was all about what strengthened the argument and what could be left out. It felt like it had a spine and a personality at that point.

It has to be something you are able to articulately defend, it has to be yours, so there might be points where you disagree with your supervisor - remember they are not examining it! Find out the pet theories of your examiners, make sure you address them and quote from their work in the area.

I also had to great fortune to have a very good friend offer to proof read it - but it would be worth paying a good proof reader. FWIW I passed with no corrections. The Internal did actually ask me if there were any typos because they had been unable to find any - well that's for me to know (I eventually found two).

Good luck - you can do it! You are on the home stretch now.

Thanks, all!

@PolterGoose - thanks for the vote of confidence! I guess I hadn't realised how much work it was going to be from figuring out what I wanted to do for the final data chapter, to having a complete draft, so I worry there is a lot more ahead of me that I don't know about. But all I can do is keep going.

@LCM001a - thank you! I am trying to do that in the draft (using highlighting etc). It's kind of working. I will be glad when my supervisor has looked at it and said what she thinks needs to be done.

@fdwthuj - indeed, @Pepperama upthread said something similar and I think that's right. Ironically, my Professional Services colleagues are much more interested in what I am doing than any academics at my institution possibly including my supervisors and my counterpart in the next door department wants to read the thesis, so I'm motivated to get it as good as possible. I won't write anything else like this again in my life. But I guess I have to take it as a job of work to get it finished.

@catsrus - thank you - this is helpful and exactly what my supervisor is saying, and that's what I've been mainly doing in the second draft, going back and laying the breadcrumbs. It's unfortunate that I am still finding it difficult to articulate how my work fits into the field, as everything is linked to everything else. As I try to finalise the literature review I keep finding people in adjacent fields who have used the same techniques to do something similar. Also, I re-read texts I read at the beginning, and understand them in a different way. My second supervisor once said he thought a PhD was an exercise in literacy as much as anything else, and I suppose I have to produce a chapter that is acceptable in the genre. But I am aware of the difference between this and the ideal of 2) reviewing the literature, 2) finding a gap, 3) plugging it, and 4) showing what you have done, and I hope I will be able to defend what I have done in a viva.

Hopefully it will be clearer once my main supervisor has read the draft. Supervisions tend to get postponed, and a week might not seem like a long time but they all add up.