Submitted

The Library at the University of Birmingham

Well I have finally done it.

On Sunday I had just done the electronic submission via Turnitin which produced a flurry of emails. It seems that my email of thanks for letting me know that my notice to submit had been received has led to a change in response and now I included in official emails about me. Maybe it is just l included my supervisor in it.
Then it was into work to print my thesis out. This took longer than seems it should. There were three basic stages. First a final proof. Mainly small changes to layout. The most common was changing the exact font of the numbers in my footnote. g guile often changed them to Times Roman or did not superscript them. However the real reason and absolute pain is Microsoft Word is lousy at handling figures in an academic text. The result is at least an hour fiddling before each attempt at printing and that is with nine in total. The second stage was the actual print. I spent most of the time standing our the printer. Birmingham University prefers to have 100 gram paper if printing double sided. The paper at Sheffield University is 70 grams. Thirdly there was the filling in of forms.Full marks to the person who created the Abstract and Access form which was in Word and could be typed in. The other forms were all pdfs. It took me well over an hour to get everything correct on three forms including a final word count, 78577 by my calculation. Then it started raining So I ended up being in work until after 5pm on a day when I was not officially in and then left my train tickets for today in the office so had to go back to collect.

So today, after a disturbed night, I got up early, showered, and breakfasted before l headed for the station. µ was only when l got there I realised that my seat was on a later train than the one I planned to get. Fortunately the first cheap train was not busy and I get a seat in the quiet coach. When I got to Birmingham New Street I bought a ticket to Kings Norton where the University Bindery is. The web said that they did a drop in service for temporary binding. I can happily report that they are as good as their word. G took lessthan five minutes between me handing overmy thesis and them being returned bound.

The a slight diversion as I went up to see my Supervisor just for a chat.It was really weird to walk out of his office and realise that there was no date to set. For the last seven and a half years I have always made sure that I had the next date to see him in my diary and even the last time ' had a 'provisional' submission date. It was good to chat. He has offered to do a viva preparation session when I know the date of my viva.

Then it was off to the library to actually formally submit. In the seven years I have been in a University library four times that I can recall: once for a course, once a failed attempt to borrow a book, to sort our my registering last year and finally today to submit. I used online Library services a lot and bought books from Amazon, Abebooks etc.However it does show the change in Libraries in the last thirty years. I was also fortunate. The girl on the desk was training another girl so everything was done very thoroughly except I was not careful enough with checking my repacking and left my handbag behind. Fortunately a student had handed it in.

There that is it. It is in and I have the afternoon and evening free in Birmingham.

I am Submitting: or the final stages

This will be brief, there will be a much longer post on Tuesday but I have been off work since Thursday and been finishing off my PhD. There were bits and pieces to do. The first couple of days was spent on the bibliography. I had to do three things.

1. Make sure every time I had referenced a text that was linked to the Bibliographic database. At various stages in the editing some referenced links had been lost. I therefore had to make sure all were active.
2. Make sure I had to make sure that every reference that I referenced was correctly and fully entered in the database. Unfortunately about three websites had disappeared. Two do not matter as they were esoteric denominational stuff. The third site was a very nice introduction to a theme. I did find it, but it is behind a paywall and it is an old version. 
3. I  had to make sure that the way the citations were happening was fine. This was a problem as the information my supervisor wanted me to put in was not standard and he was quite precise over several details. I needed to include original issue date, I needed to have page numbers just as numbers and I needed with book sections to bold the book and italicise the chapter title. I also for my own good practice standard needed to include the date when I accessed any webpage (see previous point). This involved me using CSL editor to create my own style.

After that it was layout.  It has taken me the best part of two days to meet the University requirements. The biggest pain of the whole lot is the requirements for figures. They want the figure number above and the caption below! You'd be surprised how many ways Word can mess this up and decide it is not going to behave. Anyway that will have to be sorted tomorrow in work where I am printing before I do anything else about printing. I also will need to redo the contents and the figures listing at the front of the text.

The other last minute thing was writing the acknowledgements. I have written them but just realised I should get them sent around people so that they had a chance to object. So I am hoping that they are happy as I really cannot do much editing.