How to finish your PhD

I;ve been busy! I went on holiday at long last to Lisbon, and I revised for my PhD viva, passed it, corrected my thesis and handed it in to complete my PhD!

Here is what I wrote on 43 things for completing my PhD (the only task on there i have actually noted as finished)

I started my PhD in 2004 in a research lab. At the start of my second year, I was gobsmacked to find out my supervisor was leaving to set up a new lab somewhere else in a different city in the UK. This was after he had JUST recruited a new Post Doctoral worker from Australia and a PhD student from Portugal. In fact, when I started, he already knew he was planning to leave, but neglected to inform me.

We were given the options of either moving with him or being left to fend for ourselves. At this point my project was not going well (as is very common for middle of phd) and ever worse, my relationship with my supervisor was poor. I found it difficult to talk to him.
I spoke with the student advisor, who suggested I wait until my midterm before making a decision. The midterm is half way through the phd, where you switch from an MPhil (Masters) to a full PhD program. I passed the midterm viva, and decided I did not want to move with my supervisor. In fact, no one from our lab did. Lab heads do move their labs, and usually at least half the lab moves with them. Unsurprisingly, none of us wanted to go with our supervisor, given his mercurial moods and unpleasant manner.

So I was left looking for somewhere to go. I was told that I could start afresh somewhere else, with new funding, but all my previous work would be discarded and would not count towards the new project. This was quite a shock, but I looked around. Unfortunately there was nowhere available – any lab who really wanted a new student had already filled up their lab space with incoming students for 2006. Luckily, one lab head gave me a place. So i started afresh in September 2006.

The project I was given – generating knockout mice. Now, anyone who works in this field will be able to tell you that it is a LOT of work, and hardly suitable for a PhD student, especially one in a lab which has NO experience in this sort of work. I foolishly agreed to the project, and so began 4 very stressful years. The mouse project did not work, and the second project was equally stressful, although I scraped some results in the end. My thesis was not the most exciting, but somehow I managed to put enough data together to fill it up (there was a bit of barrel scraping in some instances).

Even more fun was the fact that I had 3 years funding for a 4 year project. So I spent the last year relying on savings and my parents. My supervisor did nothing to help me find money. I am now very poor!

My advice?
If you are about to start a PhD – think VERY seriously about it! It really eats into your social life. I have lost count of how many times I didn’t go out with friends or family, how many times I was in the lab all day saturday, sunday and then back to work monday as normal. Also, trust your gut instinct regarding the supervisor. You have to work with him/her for 4 years! Make sure you insist on speaking with people in the lab.

If you are in the middle of the phd – keep your bibliography up to date! And make sure EVERY result you get is written up as if it is going to be in your thesis. You may think its rubbish and never going to see the light of day, but if you get to the end and have nothing exciting, you’ll end up going through rubbish old results just to find stuff to fill the thesis up!

Make sure you don’t get stuck on projects that seem to be going nowhere. If you have tried every alternative and optimised the method, think about where to go next, don’t just keep plodding on and banging your head against the wall. Quite often, supervisors are happy to cling to stupid methods/ideas, you may have to jump to something new which they won’t like, but it is YOUR phd, not theirs, and you;re the one who has to answer for it at the viva.

The viva itself was not that bad, at 3 hours long. I think I was probably quite lucky and got sensible examiners. They did ask a few questions which I couldn’t really answer, despite my best guesses, but I admitted I didn’t really know, and they accepted that.

I got a list of corrections to do, which i did within less than 2 weeks. I then printed my final thesis (in a nice hardback edition) and handed in copies to the lab and the university, and kept one for myself.

You may think you are never going to get through this. The last 2 years of my phd, I thought it was a prison sentence. I was literally counting down the days to freedom. So many times I fantasised about running away, or writing a resignation letter. My secondary supervisor was perfect for offering the moral support and shoulder to cry on that my primary supervisor was never going to give. My family did their bit too. Finishing the phd is a matter of endurance and taking the pain, but don’t let the frustration cloud your judgement. Make sure you discuss your work as often as possible with as many different people as possible (ensuring they aren’t people who might want to steal it) to see if others have interesting insights, or think your ideas are plain nuts :)

Good luck

What an amazing few days

Firstly, Eid Mubarak! The holy month of Ramadhan ended, and virtually everyone seems to have celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr, the festival of the fast breaking, on the same day (since the Islamic calendar relies on a lunar calendar and on people sighting the new moon, people can disagree on whether the new month has started or not).

On that same day, I decided to go into work and hand in my thesis! I paid extra to have it bound more quickly. They look awesome. I can't express how happy I am to get to this stage. Even if I fail my viva, at least I got here and submitted something!. Now all I have to do is wait for my examiners to read my 200 page thesis before we decide on an examination date so we can meet and they can spend 2-5 hours tearing it to shreds and reducing me to tears. In Ukraine, PhD examinations are in public, with the institute and your friends and family as audience members!

Now that I am a man of leisure, I decided to... go back to work for one last experiment, which gave good results. It was an expression construct I had made, basically a piece of DNA to make cells create a protein they wouldn't normally make. It works, so maybe my lab can use it after I leave in future experiments! Other than that, I have been enjoying myself at last. I ordered a new Xbox 360 slim from the Microsoft store which went missing so I got fed up and got a refund, and got an xbox bundle from HMV instead. They delivered the xbox and game fairly quickly, but still haven't delivered the second game, 3 weeks later. The new xbox is awesome. It is a lot smaller than previous models. It DOES still get rather hot, which is worrying. At least the fan is a lot more quiet. With its impressive 250GB hard drive, I have started saving games to the hard drive, so that the machine doesn't have to work as hard and there is reduced risk of scratching the game disc. So far I have been replaying Mass Effect 2 on Hardcore.

I also attended the Lost Marathon at the Prince Charles Cinema. They decided to show all 120 hours worth of six seasons of the show Lost, back to back. I got there on Monday at 8am, expecting a huge queue of people. The queue consisted of about 10 people waiting forlornly. I was on my own so just struck up conversation with some of them. Nerds are good at making friends with each other :) In the end only about 50 or so people went in. I didn't think I would get in and had only planned to stay a few hours. I nonetheless stayed for 24 hours, which took me through season one and into the first 3 episodes of season two. Seeing Lost on the big screen was incredible. I have never really rewatched any of the episodes, so I had forgotten a lot of season one events. It really struck me just how brutal and harsh their life was on the island! The cinema showed the episodes in 4 hour blocks, with 15 minute breaks. I had no change of clothes, and no sleeping bag. I decided I would go mad if I stayed there longer so I left. I nonetheless got a goody bag, consisting of Season 6 DVD set, a poster, a tshirt and an Artifacts booklet with snippets from the upcoming Encyclopedia. I almost wish I had stayed until The End on Friday morning, but I think I would have become as deranged as Claire by that point.