Last Supervision

I am in Costa surrounded by exam anxious students. I have about half an hour before I need to head off for my superiors leaving do. The department at the last minute decided to invite his Phd students Normally l would send apologies but as I was in Birmingham for a supervision it felt churlish not to go. So I am off for an Indian with a group of people I vaguely know.

Today is anyway my last supervision so may be there is something of an end term feel about it for me to. I made the mistake of trusting the Met Office forecast and I brought a coat. It has of course been sunny all the time I have been here. Oh well perhaps I will need it on the journey back.

The supervision consisted ofworking through many minor edits. The biggest one is the requirement to assert my originality. It is no longer good enough to be original (my examiners are quite clear that I am) you also need to be prepared to shout to the world that you are. Anyway the abstract needs rephrasing to say so and l need to add one paragraph to the belonging chapterand rewrite a section in the epilogue to cover this.

That does not sound much but I have to cut 20, 000 words from the thesis. This is going to be a painful tedious edit as there is no extraneous sections. Thus, I will have to edit the whole thesis cutting small diversions and trying to shorten sentences. I will do it at the same time as working though the minor corrections. As this is pure editing andnot rewriting I am giving myself a fortnight to do it. So I am looking to submit early June.

Onwards and Upwards!

Another Draft

This is really a quick note to say that as of tonight I have a semi-final draft for this submission. This is not the resubmission, it is however the start of the process of resubmission. I still have to do a few minor corrections but it is in the state my supervisor can read it.  The process from here on is as follows:

• minor corrections and check abstract
• draft cover document for the examiners
• have supervision which will give the last changes my supervisor wants
• make the corrections and do a basic format so that the full text can go to the editors
• break while I let the editors work
• revise and if I make alteration send back to editors
• submit

It feels so different this time. The thesis is more like a thesis. The argument is contained really within a single chapter with three data chapters. It is not totally usual as I have an epilogue rather than a conclusion as basically I finish the argument at the end of the previous chapter. The epilogue deals with the relevance of my research. It is a hard task to negotiate the Scylla of making claims that are far to far reaching for the research and on the other hand the Charybdis of claim so little that your work seems irrelevant. Anyway it is done.

Well next weekend will be spent in minor editing.