These are pieces written to desribe what it is like working in science.
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This section details my experiences towards the end of my Ph.D., and the trauma of writing a thesis! See starting a Ph.D. and what I wish I’d know before I started my Ph.D. for tips and experiences earlier on.
I really enjoyed some aspects of writing my thesis, but I found it difficult to combine with laboratory work. There were inevitably distractions in the lab, it would get late in the day and I would then find it hard to get into writing. When my experiments began to wind down, I spent a lot of time making figures for the results section and gathering information for the materials and methods. This saved a lot of time later on as finding all the relevant files can be made very complicated and time-consuming if you have not been organised about where and how you store your data. I then stopped lab work and had about two months to concentrate on writing.
I found it really helpful to draft my abstract and make an overview plan of my thesis to help me focus on its content, then make more detailed plans of each section. I would go through these with my advisor and then stick to them. It is important that the amount of detail about each subject in your introduction reflects its relevance to your results and discussion, rather than the amount of reading that you have done about them. It is easy to get carried away on the areas that you are more interested in, or write less about the areas that are more challenging. After making my figures and deciding on the order of the materials and methods, I began writing the introduction and results chapters. I found it helpful to keep a note pad in which I wrote any ideas that came to me that I might like to include in the discussion. I completed the materials and methods and worked on the discussion at the end. I wrote the final draft of my abstract last of all.
I could not concentrate on writing for long periods at a time. This will be different for each Ph.D. student, but I found it incredibly draining to write for more than two or three hours at a time on the same topic. I overcame this problem by making sure that I always had three or four topics on the go at any one time. When I became frustrated or tired with one topic, I would go for a walk, do a bit or housework, read a book or watch television for half an hour or so, then start on a different topic. I had to be strict with what I did in my breaks, as they can easily become an hour, then two, and then I would find it impossible to get into writing again. I did not have internet access at home and not only did I cope without it, I think it was probably a good thing as it would have been a distraction for me. If I needed references I would make a note of them in the body of the text, with a mark such as three pound signs so that I could search for them later and be confident that I had not left any comments uncorrected. I would then spend one or two evenings a week at work with access to the internet, searching for the three pound signs and inserting the references.
After submission of my thesis, I had a couple of months before my viva. I asked lots of people about their experiences and most feedback was positive, so although I was very nervous, I didn’t want to waste a good opportunity to go through my data with two examiners who knew a lot about my field of research, and could be helpful in improving my thesis. My viva took around 3 hours, but it absolutely flew by for me. I had spent a couple of weeks reading through recent relevant publications and the papers that I had included in my these that I thought were most important and that I should make sure I fully understood, so there was a lot to talk about! Useful direction from my supervisor included thinking about the most important findings from my research and which experiments I would like to do next. I tried to slowly build my answers to questions that the examiners asked and not to rush. I also tried to show that I had been thinking independently about my work, and that I had formed hypotheses based on my data. In the end the viva was actually quite enjoyable!
Carly Guyver.