A month in the life of a final-year PhD student

So, I am in the fourth year of my PhD studies, which in the UK system is called the writing-up period. I’ve started getting asked “when are you done?” more and more often towards the end of year three, and while it’s a legitimate question coming from a place of care, it stings every time. Because the truth is, I don’t know, I can’t control it entirely. Everyday is a grind and most of the time I just try to survive. So, as I had a productive meeting with my supervisor yesterday, I think I deserve to take it easy today and can spend some time documenting this gruesome period in a blog post for my future self’s entertainment.

Here’s our plans for the next month:

The paper

I’ve been working almost exclusively on my first empirical paper for more than half a year now. The current draft is the 7th version, so roughly one round of revision with my supervisor every month. It is expected that the next draft is going to be the next-to-last revision round before we submit it to a journal. After that, the grind will still continues but with other flavours: desk rejections, reviewers’ comments, revise and resubmit, or even reject and resubmit. Who knows where it will lead?

So my task for the next two weeks is to focus on addressing my supervisor’s comments from yesterday’s meeting on the findings and discussion sections. To put it in layman’s terms, rewriting the whole stuff from beginning to end because the literature review has to match the findings and the introduction has to match the discussion. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the academic writing process but it’s a lot to do in 2 weeks. I will have to:

• Read more literature to reinforce my conceptualisation.
• Go back to the coding on NVivo to rearrange and pull up more data.
• Write the stuff.
• Redraw the conceptual map and coding structure.
• Write the abstract because it’s about time.
• Edit the paper format, check every reference.

The thesis

Because I’m in the 39th month of my PhD studies, surprise surprise, I have the 40-month review coming up next month! (I have thought the 30-month review would be my last progression review but hey, sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to, and that’s alright.) The thing is, I can’t just tell the reviewer panel that I have progressed sufficiently without having something new in the thesis. So in the next 2 weeks after I have worked on the paper revision, I have to devote myself to the thesis. The tasks include:

• Revise the current findings chapter.
• Work on the coding for the second research question.
• Write the findings for the second research question.
• Write the discussion chapter for the first and second research questions.
• Prepare the progression report, research development report, thesis plan, and a presentation.

The conference

I have plans to attend the British Academy of Management (BAM) conference this year, and have committed to review three papers for the conference. The deadline for submitting the reviews is a month from now, so I will have to somehow carve out the time for this task too.

Oh and there is an internal conference in our business school as well. I will have to design a poster for this conference and the deadline for submission is mid-April. 🙂

The job application

My funding has stopped, so I have to get a job, like, now. I have sent my CVs everywhere in the past few months but have had no luck yet. So in the next month I will also have to:

• Update my CV to academic standards.
• Write a research statement and a teaching philosophy statement.
• Speak to potential referees and convince them to help me.
• Scout for job adverts and continue sending CVs.

The pledge

Now how I will manage to do all of this in the next month, I don’t really know. All I know is everyone who has a PhD has gone through this stage and they came out alright (almost). I can do it too. And I’m pretty feisty, too. Let’s see.