The Man with No Time

Just a quick post today. I've finally managed to get the last science chapter from my PhD thesis published in an astronomy journal. It's a taken a while - I only worked on it on and off for several months, and it actually needed a fair amount of work done to it. Then the referee had several, really rather useful suggestions for improvements, which held it up a bit more. But as of today it's available online, either from the journal itself or as a preprint on the arXiv. If, for some reason, you're interested, here are the links: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society version arXiv preprint version Happy reading!

It is complete! My PhD is over, and I can finally relax for a couple of days. I've been in St Andrews all week, and have just got on the train back to Coventry after staying at my Granny's last night. My viva voce was on Tuesday afternoon, and I spent Wednesday to Friday making the corrections that my examiners asked for. It was a pretty intense week, and I'm glad it's over. For so many reasons. (Credit: Figure-of-L on deviantart.com)

In this whole mess that is me moving to a new job, moving house, putting stuff into storage, and trying to finish up my PhD all at the same time, there is a ray of hope. That's right, my thesis is complete! Celebration time! It's finished! I actually finished it last Monday, but I left the complete version with my supervisor for him to take a look at before Friday. Needless to say he'd forgotten to do so, so we spent half an hour going over a couple of sections on Friday afternoon, then I printed it out. Which took 3 hours! Yes, I was printing three copies, but I'd forgotten just how badly my high-resolution png images affected the printer. Every time it got to a page with one of more of my plots the printer sat there thinking for a minute or two, and there are a lot of plots in my thesis! Sadly this meant that I couldn't get it handed in before I left, so I tasked a couple of my friends with securing my supervisor's signature, getting it bound, ...

Just a quick update today on how my thesis is going. I'm now starting to really get into the writing process, and although I'm trying to do some other work at the same time, I've been able to get a lot done this week. I say I'm trying to do other work as well, but that's going rather poorly to be honest! Since the last time I mentioned my thesis (which was quite a while ago actually), I've modified my plan somewhat. I'm now planning on having eight chapters, having split a couple of them up for brevity. Of those eight, after this week I have 3 that are drafted, and that I'm relatively happy with. I spent most of the week working on my introduction chapter, which is reasonably well sorted now. I took the decision to split off some of the more specialised theory and literature review into the relevant chapters, letting my keep my first chapter more general. I then did some work at the weekend (that wasn't making up for a day off) for the first ...

The final year of my PhD is now well underway, and I'm currently making good progress with my thesis writing. At the moment I have three chapters that are almost fully drafted, out of the six that I intend to end up with. Of the remaining three two are the introduction and conclusion chapters, so I'm looking in good shape at the moment. I'm deliberately pacing myself with the thesis; at the moment I'm working on the science content of the fourth main chapter, which requires running lots of code for long periods of time, so I've got a lot of time on my hands. (Credit: PhD comics)

A few things have been going on in my working life that I thought I'd quickly comment on before the slightly meatier posts that I've got planned for later in the week. I've finally finished the first draft of my third academic publication, and handed it to my supervisor at the end of last week. That's a big piece of work done, as it means that if everything goes wrong I already have enough work for my thesis. I'm still, however, planning to go back to my original area of research (tides in exoplanet systems) and try to get a fourth paper pushed out by Easter next year. I've already started looking back at what I did previously to try to figure out where I can improve my method, and I've got some ideas for things to try out. Obviously I'll need to do make some changes to this third paper once my supervisor hands it back to me, but I'm hoping that those won't be too substantial. On the subject of my thesis, I've actually started writi...