Submitted: the end?
My PhD candidate status now reads: submitted. My last blog optimistically suggested that submission was about six weeks away. That turned into six months.
How does it feel to submit? What took so long? Is this the end?
“A PhD is a process of transformation and the production of an output […] focus on finishing. That final point has been my recent dilemma, and one perhaps also awaiting you” (April 2026)
How does it feel to submit? It is quite a moment. Pressing submit and letting go of thesis to next be read by external examiners: it felt significant and a big commitment now made.
What took so long? The commitment made at the moment of submission, and the significance of it, helps explain why the optimism of six weeks away throughout my fourth year remained recurrently blind to what lay ahead. The output now submitted was not as I imagined. It includes 22 figures, it advances theory I was not well aware of until recently, and adds more to discussion with other fields than I envisaged. In reality, the transformations within me were still incoming and a few surprises were still to be sprung as I wrote those words in April. My absence from this blog of late tells its own tale.
What took so long was the (re)working to be done before submission. I think for most PhD candidates this task is substantial. For me, the move from reporting results and into the different framing of discussing and developing new theory from results reported is no small task. I also had to to return to methodology to explain what was done (i.e., in the past tense), and whilst a joyous rewrite this further exemplifies the time consuming extra writing I had not really planned for. Likewise, I rewrote my problem statement and literature review through different eyes in these last two months. The transformation within in April was incomplete. My insights and confidence in my own work, and the latter-realised authority in subjects I now own all found new voice with those eyes anew. None of that could have been foreseen as is now seen looking back.
Beware the new world bleeding into the old in this tough but joyous final few months! My funding stopped as scheduled at the time of writing that last blog in April. I have since been consulting a little whilst also (re)writing my thesis countless times. Applications for post-graduate funding are also exacting, time-consuming, and the odds of approval are generally not great. I experienced my first funding rejection in August. A funding proposal I would have been invited into as a nominated post-doc was unsuccessful in July. Nonetheless, such applications helped me focus the clarity of what contribution the PhD itself has made, and demanded I think upon what is then different about what might be researched next. I jokingly called the final months of a PhD the fluffy back-end; but, as predicted, it is not fluffy!
Is submission the end? No, but it is a big step forward. Furthermore, the fluffy back-end I joke about in this series is real in the sense of no self-evident moment of closure. Future focus is one example. The more important from a PhD perspective is what is next. I now prepare to defend by my own voice what I have claimed to have contributed to my field, i.e., viva voce (with the living voice). That defence decides if what I submitted as an output and merits doctoral award. I am not done transforming into an academic yet…
…to be continued
| Start date | 01 Oct 2022 |
| Faculty/School Deadline for submission of FFPR (First Formal Progress Report) | 28 Feb 2023 |
| Deadline for decision on FFPR | 01 Apr 2023 |
| Faculty/School Deadline for submission of Transfer Report | 31 Jul 2023 |
| Deadline for decision on Transfer | 30 Sept 2023 |
| Faculty/School Deadline for submission of APR (Annual Progress Report) | 31 Jul 2025 |
| Deadline for decision on APR | 30 Sept 2025 |
| Expected thesis submission date | 30 Sept 2025 |
| Maximum time limit for thesis submission | 30 Sept 2026 |