I worked 212.2 hours in December in order to get my thesis done on time to submit on the 30th. The last week was especially intense (ramping up: 9:44 hours on Thursday, 15:11 hours on Saturday, and 16:47 hours on Sunday), as my supervisor didn't have time to start reading it and making suggestions for improvements till after Christmas. However, she is very good with her suggestions, and kept adding them for several days, during which time I was doing the work to make the changes as fast as I could, while she kept reading and making suggestions... which meant that I wasn't able to complete the full list of suggestions, which means that my examiners are very likely to ask for corrections before I pass. I can cope with that. Done enough is beautiful for now.
This has been an interesting document to write the whole "your funding is up, you failed to bring in new funding, so now it is write the thesis this term or you start paying tuition out of your own pocket" thing meant that everything got really compressed. In terms of Durham regulations, I still have a couple of years half-time left to do the work. I don't have that kind of budget though, so nope. Done.
So to write it, I came up with a document structure, wrote the outline, and started writing sections. Saw how little time was left, went back to other sections and stuck in a little rough skelton-level text to seperate the some of the headings from one another a bit, then went back to work on the hard science parts that are the meat of the thesis. Got one section more or less done, and fleshed out a little of the skeleton bits. Then went and worked properly on another hard-science sections. Then tossed a little more meat towards the exposed bones in the archaeology sections, before working on the final hard science bit and getting it properly done, intending to go back and do a read-through and figure out what more needs doing to properly round out the barely fleshed over (and in some places bare bones) parts, but... that was when my supervisor started making suggestions, starting with the archaeology chapters, so the suggestions were very much along the lines of "you need more analysis here", and "why have you cited so few of the important papers here--add the rest" kind of level. This made deciding where to start easy, I started from the beginning and worked through the suggestions as fast as I could. Then, when she sent me the "done" note, I jumped to the discussion and conclusions sections, and did all of those changes before jumping back to the middle and continuing working, right up to the point where I really, really needed to just compile out of Scrivner and check the Word document for issues with headings and figure numbers. At that point I check my word count totals for the sections, and I was at 62K words for the thesis itself, not counting figures and tables, references, or appendix. The web page I had last consulted had said that the MPhil is max 60,000 words, so I decided to move the research paper draft from Chapter 9 to the appendix, which brought the total to 54k words. Then I did the compile and check for issues with headings and figure numbers.
Solved those issues, and finally got a good copy. Then it was just formatting and sticking in the appendixes, which had already been compiled to a good version weeks ago, and adjust the page numbers so that before the introduction they are i, ii, iii, etc., and then it goes from page 1 at the Introduction, and keeps counting across the borders to the appendices. I managed to get it to a clean pdf and submitted around 20:00, and sent my supervisors an email, with a link to the pdf for their records, letting them know I had moved the paper, and why.
The next morning I woke to an email from my main supervisor saying that it was a shame I had moved the paper draft, as it had important and well developed discussions, and the examiners don't have to read the appendix, and the paper is a better length with it, as it should be "around 60 k words, and without it, it is a little short". That was a Sunday, so no human would have seen it yet, so I decided to make a new pdf, with the paper back in place as Chapter 9 and upload it as well, along with a note about my supervisor preferring the version with it as chapter 9, and I would leave it to the admin office which version is given to the examiners.
Having spent a couple of hours doing the clean up of the compiled document to fix the formatting and make a nice pdf I wasn't looking forward to doing it again, and was feeling tired, kinda brain-dead, and rushed to get to the part of spending time with my houseguests, who had arrived the day before, while I was still working. This probably explains why I didn't think of the easy solution right away, and tried to just power through the ordeal of a new compile. I powered too hard. I opened Scrivener, and the second the program looked open I grabbed the paper, and dragged it to the correct location in the binder. And things froze up. Tired, frustrated, and totally lacking in patience (see above list for hours worked, and understand that sleep hadn't much happened all week), rather than waiting for whatever process was happening in the background to finish, I opened the windows task manager and closed the program. I Do Not recommend doing this. When I reopened Scrivener it gave me an error message about problems with the search index and suggested I try rebuilding the search index. I did this, after which the program happily presented me with the complete list of all of the documents, sub documents, and research sections that should be there, but said that there are zero words in any of them.
For the past months I have been backing up my data every evening when I was done. Scrivner makes a backup file automatically each time I shut down, and the next day overwrites it with the next day's backup file, so, in addition to synchronizing all of the folders I use with their copies on the external hard drive, I have also been copying those backups over, into alternate day folders. Right up to Friday night. Saturday, when I submitted the thesis I didn't have the attention span left to wait for that backup to finish being created, and walked away from the computer, and didn't remember to copy it to D drive before I opened Scrivner to make the change to the position of that paper, and it somehow also got corrupted in the process of breaking the file. Oops.
In my panic I decided that I needed to take the backup of the day before, which is nearly complete, but lacks more than 16 hours of work, and start copying in the revised text from the thesis. So saved a copy of the broken version, in case it becomes possible to fix later, and moved Friday's backup into the active folder, and started copying over the changes from the Word document. It didn't take long to realize that this was going to take ages to do, and I wasn't going to be able to enjoy the company of my house guests during the day, before the New Year's party started. So I went out and asked for suggestions as to what to do, and Sofie came in, got me to explain the problem, what I had done, and that while the Scrivener file has problems, both the Word doc and the pdf have all of the data.
At this point I realized that I don't actually have to do anything in Scrivner to move that Chapter. It is a simple copy-paste job in Word, and then I need to change the chapter title by hand for three chapters, only one of which has a single sub heading that also needed a new number. It took no more than five minutes. If I had had the brain to do that in the first place, I wouldn't have broken the Scrivener file, nor had an extra hour of stress and misery on Sunday morning.
So, the revised file got submitted, along with a note saying:
"Yesterday I submitted my thesis. In that document I thought that the thesis itself (not counting figures, tables, references and appendix) could not exceed 60,000 words. Therefore I took my research paper, which had been intended to be a thesis chapter, and moved it to the appendix, which brought it from 62k to 54k.
After I submitted I told my supervisor what I had done, and this morning she replied that it is a shame, as the paper is important, and it is ok if it is "around" 60 K. This is the document with the paper in correct place. You may choose if you give the examiners this version, or if it must be the other as this is one day late. Thank you."
Yesterday I got a note from the admin office that recieved it saying they would pass on the second version to the examiners, and that the max word count for the MPhil is 70K, so I am good. Today I have sent Scrivener support an email asking if they might be able to fix the corrupt files, if so please let me know how best to share them. If they can't (or won't) I will have some hours work to get Scrivener files up to date again, but it is doable. In that case, I think my best bet will be to import the Word document into Scrivener in a new section, labeled "as submitted--archive", and then open each section of the document with the original and as submitted side by side to see what is different and update the original (which has lots of links to the cards for the things cited, and for other sections, etc, which are worth retaining, which is why I am not going to just completely replace the text using the Word version--those links don't exist in the complied to Word version).
Luckily, it will be some weeks before the examiners will have had time to read it, and I only need these files working by the time they come back with a "make these corrections" suggestions.
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