With the annual progress report hurdles safely jumped and your thesis well on the way to completion the next hurdle to think about is the PhD submission deadline. Submitting a day late can result in a fail!
Plan well in advance
You need to be planning for your submission well in advance. Build into your plan a contingency – maybe two weeks – to cover last-minute “the dog ate my thesis” disasters. People submitting a PhD thesis are among the brightest around but you would not believe the disaster that manages to happen around this time. Be smart – don’t leave things until the last few days. Things that you thought were going to be dealt with in an hour can suddenly take days or more, formatting and hunting down missing references are commonly mentioned.
Don’t forget the PhD submission admin!
As you come close to submission you will start to realise that there is a fair bit of administration involved. For some candidates, this administrative element is a major challenge.
Each university, and even each department, have their own set of administrative requirements surrounding thesis submission. A PhD candidate needs to make sure there are no last-minute surprises among these requirements. The best way to achieve this is to know them thoroughly months before submission. Personally, I advise my candidates to write them down and talk them through with the supervisor, suggests Stevens.
Based on his own experiences with candidates, I suggest the following checklist:
- Check the exact date of submission with an official written source (not a chat with another candidate) then write it up somewhere prominently.
- If you work in separate chapters don’t leave it until the last minute to combine them. Put them together a couple of months before submission.
- Formatting – don’t wait until the last few days to get your Word documents formatted according to the university’s (or department’s) requirements. Preferably, work in correctly formatted documents from an early stage. This means fonts, font sizes, margins, headings, page numbers etc. etc.
- Know exactly where you need to drop off your thesis, how to get there and when it opens and closes.
- Get hold of your administration forms well (at least weeks) in advance and check who needs to sign them.
- Make a print, bind and copy plan. Where will you print? Do you need to bind? How many copies will you need? If you are using a print shop, check them out, their reviews and exactly what services they offer.
- If you decide to print yourself, have you stocked up on printer inks?
- Will you be using colour inks? If so stock up on these too. Also, remember that things that look legible on screen may turn out to be illegible when printed. Do a test print for legibility.
- Get someone to look over your thesis when printed to look for obvious mistakes. Not proofreading (hopefully that’s done by now) but things like spelling mistakes on the title page (believe me it happens).
- Check your page numbers! One client messed these up and later couldn’t work out which pages the examiners were talking about in their report.
If your PhD submission is looming I wish you the best of luck. If you need some editing or proofreading before then, why not drop me an email.
