"Can't you hear me, S.O.S.?": TLG's PhD study blog!

You do like helping people though I think it's in your nature! Not helpful related to your own work tho unfort!

Trying to get the bullet-pointing going again. First reading through my thesis plan and making some amendments

How are you finding the overall thesis at the moment?

I'm still enjoying the process atm but that's because I'm slowly building up this chapter that I'm working on. Over the years, supervisor and I have learnt that (unless manic) I can't just jump straight into prose writing. So just bullet-pointing all the fieldwork stuff and playing around with the structure. Then we'll start weaving in academic literature, etc. So it's a slow process but makes it feel more manageable?

I'm doing another conference in mid-April but a lot of the reading for that is already done

So yeah, overall still enjoying the PhD a lot. I'm dreading the point where I have to spend lots of time just writing writing writing, and then editing loads though

My life at the moment

But it's sounding good though How much have you gotten written up at this stage? You've got this!

I haven't done a recent count-up of words but I have 6 chapters and an epilogue in my thesis. Chapters 1 and 2 were written up fully for my upgrade (though will have to go back and redo nearer submission time) and I've got about 2,500 words of Chapter 3. The conference paper I did in Amsterdam was on Chapter 6, so that's around 2,700 words of that and am trying to expand that now through bullet-pointing.

The last time I counted, I had something like 37,000 words written but will need to be edited down and revised, etc. Tbh I'm gonna end up writing waaaaaaaaaay too much. Supervisor is adamant that she wants the thesis nearer to 90,000 words than the upper limit of 100,000 words and I'm just like So we agreed that I'll write everything I want to write and then we'll just chop however much needed out

Thanks hun, appreciate your commenting and the support

Honestly, that sounds like a really good position that you're in and I'm really glad to hear that it's going well. I think it's really easy to worry that you're not making as much progress as you'd like to, but I think that it's one of those things of just chipping slowly away.

I'm in the complete opposite problem in that my supervisors are probably expecting me to have a fairly short thesis in the end. I'll be happy if I get over 140 pages at this rate!

Met mentor today. She (quite accurately) pointed out that I'm getting all worked up about the structure and sub-sections of my chapter, in order to delay/avoid the actual writing process

So yeah, need to actually get my head down and write a bit

I do this so much, and I'm not even final year undergrad but even just bullet point stuff then you can rearrange them easily after? Just starting is the hardest part, so if you can do even a tiny bit of writing one day that's the worst bit done

It'll come back, don't worry too much about it. It's a gradual process!

Thanks I really hope so!

I spent a year giving myself a hard time about the amount I was(n't) writing, haha. It will come back, and you'll be fine

I'll trust you on this!

Maybe I just need to sing the 'I Have Confidence' song from The Sound of Music to myself

Haha yes, trust me, I'm a doctor!