March was always going to be a strange month for me. My PhD viva was taking place on the 25th, three days later I’d move out from my houseshare and two days after that I’d leave the UK to go travelling.
Then along came COVID-19 and added some further levels of complexity. I’ve now had a few weeks to reflect on everything, so I figured I’d share with you the rather unusual end to my PhD.
Since writing this post I’ve started a monthly series with what I’m up to while my travel plans are on hold! You can find the Beyond the PhD series here.
My original plan
- Submit thesis
- Write up papers
- Have the viva
- Move out of my London houseshare
- Go to Indonesia for two months
- Make my thesis corrections once back in the UK
I submitted my thesis on 14th February (yes, Valentines Day!) just under six weeks before the agreed viva date of 25th March.
My PhD funding officially finished at the end of February, but my supervisor kindly found some extra money to be able pay me in March. This would allow me to write up some papers we hadn’t yet submitted.
The expectation was that just a few days after the viva I would move out of my London house and travel to Bali where we’d celebrate my girlfriend’s 30th birthday.
I was then fully expecting to come back to the research group’s office in June for a week or two to do any thesis corrections, before setting off on a much longer trip abroad.
Reality
Until a few weeks in to March everything was going to plan. After submitting the thesis I was making good progress with the papers just as planned. However, by mid-March it was clear that the virus was going to cause significant disruption around the world. Here is how it affected the last bit of my PhD.
Moving out
A few weeks before the viva it was agreed with both examiners that we would keep the date of the viva but move to an online assessment via Microsoft Teams.
Around the same time my girlfriend and I came to the realisation that we wouldn’t be able to go on our trip but had already found new housemates for our room in London.
Although we organised viewings well ahead of our move-out date, it still took longer than I’d have liked to get everything signed and it was getting pretty stressful as the virus situation developed. Considering I wouldn’t have any more PhD funding and my girlfriend had handed in her notice to leave her job , we really wanted to avoid having to pay the rent for any longer than necessary (London living costs are detailed here and annual expenses here).
Thankfully all of the paperwork was signed about a week and a half before the viva: a big relief!
Since we could no longer go abroad, we had to make alternative living arrangements.
There wasn’t much of an option to go and live with my family in London due to a lack of spare bedrooms. It also wouldn’t have been ideal to try and rent another room considering there’s no way of knowing how long the current situation will last for.
Very fortunately my girlfriend’s family in Bristol had space for us to stay and are charging us a minimal amount for rent. In the end we moved out a week earlier than necessarily, both for fear of potentially not being able to travel on the official handover date and to be settled before my viva.
We certainly got lucky, both with how early we organised the replacement housemates and to have somewhere convenient to live on a small budget.
PhD Viva
Moving to Bristol took up a lot of my time in the fortnight before the viva, so it wasn’t until a few days before that I had time to properly focus on it.
Having a remote viva was certainly an unusual experience which I’ll detail in a separate post in the near future.
I wasn’t sure if it would be easier or more difficult than doing it in person, and I guess I’ll never know! In short: I passed with minor corrections!
I had intentionally decided to not try and stay on as a postdoc with my current group , as I had planned to take a career break to go travelling, but it was still a bit of a shock to leave so suddenly.
I was originally expecting to go out for celebratory drinks but sadly haven’t been able to say goodbye in-person to most of my friends and colleagues: a good excuse to go back once things have calmed down!
Thesis corrections
An upside to not leaving the UK was that I immediately started making corrections to the thesis the day after the viva.
I was dreading the idea of trying to work on my thesis from only my laptop: I was used to using two big monitors on a computer set up with all the right software.
Thankfully, because I knew I would still have papers to write up after leaving London, I had made plans to save a copy of all of my PhD work to an external hard drive . Just before Imperial officially closed I went in and took a copy of everything including my EndNote library of references. My work included huge stacks of 3D image files: it would have been far too much data to access and download from the cloud!
This bit of preparation in making sure I could access all my data and successfully update references in documents made the corrections process far easier to do from my laptop than I had originally feared.
There were a few things I would ideally have accessed from my lab workstation but I couldn’t reliably use Remote Desktop without pulling out my hair.
Therefore a few of the suggested corrections could not be made but thankfully they were not crucial to the thesis. I’m midway through a full writeup of making the corrections so lookout for the dedicated post shortly!
A few days later I was able to get the corrections approved and a few days after that received this nice email:
It was a bit surreal getting everything wrapped up so soon. The whole process was sped up and I had expected to get this email in June or July: not the start of April. I ended up getting confirmation of the PhD within seven weeks of submitting the thesis!
The upside was that everything was really fresh in my mind: both for the viva and for making changes to the thesis.
Writing Papers
During my PhD I only published one first-author paper. I’m slightly disappointed to have not had more published by the time of finishing the PhD but thankfully I had several potentially publishable thesis chapters.
After submitting my corrections I worked full time on papers through to the end of the first week of April. I then spoke to my supervisor and basically said that I’d rather take a break and finish writing up papers on a more casual basis.
Being voluntarily unemployed has in fact been a welcome break, having not taken any holidays for quite a while. More on that in the next post.
What has happened to the papers I was working on? Here are the results chapters from my thesis:
- Chapter 3: Published (here). Supplementary results to be submitted as a paper but requires more writing.
- Chapter 4: We submitted just before Easter and was rejected a week later: my first but surely not last rejection!
- Chapter 5: Currently being circulated to co-authors. (Published September 2020 here)
- Chapter 6: I have a rough draft of a paper written but we’re not sure yet if it’ll get published or perhaps be combined with another bigger paper which is yet to come. (Published September 2020 as a separate article here)
Hopefully the work from Chapters 4 and 5 will progress successfully to publication over the coming months, though it is concerning that I can’t realistically make any significant changes remotely.
I’m definitely keen to publish the supplementary work from Chapter 3, but it was outside the scope of my main PhD work thus requires more effort to practically write it from scratch.
I have various longer term plans I’m starting to work towards but at the moment I’m enjoying taking it slow and having a bit of a rest!
I hope that the current situation doesn’t negatively you and your work too much. Here I shared a few ideas every PhD should be able to get on with from home. Feel free to contact me or leave a reply if I can help.
