Reaching the finish line

Hi all,

I thought I would share my current thoughts on coming towards the end of a PhD. For me, it is really nice to see how everything is finally starting to come together and I can start to slot the pieces of my PhD research jigsaw together to write about what I have done and found during my PhD journey.

I appreciate that not all of this will be the most riveting read! Parts where I spent a lot of time optimizing methods aren’t the easiest to write, but I know that these steps explain the path to my results and that without them my story would make no sense.

I am nervous about the time that I have left and how much I feel I have to do/write within this time, but I am hoping that once I get going I can steam roller through some parts to give me more time to spend on others. My supervisors have been supportive, telling me not to worry about how good a draft is, but just to get words on paper so they can start helping me to make progress quickly.

I think the PhD experience is different for different people, but I just wanted to share my plan for the dreading writing process. This mainly consists of just trying to write and not worry too much about the order of things or how they look for now, those things are easily changed, so I just want the content to be there first and foremost. I also plan on working out how and where I work best. At the moment I am thinking of splitting my time between home and the office and see if this mix works the best or whether one option results in more productivity than the other. Also, even though my PhD is immensely important to me, I want to maintain some sort of routine so that I don’t spend endless hours at the computer which may mean I don’t make as much progress as I could because it is impossible to be 100% focused 100% of the time. I also need to fit some more work in at the weekends, so my weekend routine needs to adapt to this, but I am sure once I get into the swing of writing more, this will become an easier task as that is what I have found previously.

Best of luck to all those in a similar position, I hope you find finishing your PhD to be a positive experience. I think mine will be……once I have more written!

Happy PhD-ing!