To ‘submit’ your doctorate is to initiate its final evaluation. This
stage is marked off by various university bureaucratic proce-
dures, which will vary from one place to another. Check that
you know what you are required to do in your particular faculty
and university well before you are close to finishing, ideally a
year ahead of when you plan to submit. And you should discuss
the timings involved with your supervisor, because they can be
quite lengthy. The general format of submission procedures is
that you may have to formally register a thesis title (usually
accompanied by an interim abstract) around six months ahead
of when you plan to be examined. You then need to produce a
complete text printed perfectly in strict conformity with any
university requirements on formatting. All the charts and tables
must be in the right places, where they are referred to and not
at the ends of chapters. All the references and the bibliography
must be fully complete, along with all the appendices. And the
whole thing needs to be numbered in a single page order from
start to finish. If all these conditions are met then you may be
ready to get the thesis bound for the examiners to read. Some
universities will let you use spiral binding at the examination
stage, reserving the full cloth-bound version for later when you
submit to the library a final version of the thesis incorporating
any revisions which the examiners have asked for. Other uni-
versities insist on a cloth-bound version for the examiners or
dissertation committee, which then has to be broken up and
rebound in a revised version if the examiners find that changes
are needed. Along with your full text, universities normally
require you and your supervisors or advisers to sign off on a
number of forms, usually certifying that the work is original,
fits within the required work limits, and has been approved for
submission by your advisers.
Getting examined is often a very slow-moving process at PhD
level. Once the examiners have copies of the thesis it will take
them from six weeks to three months to read it and for your
supervisor or the university to fix a date for an oral examina-
tion (where necessary). You should also remember that in most
countries the time window for submitting is quite restricted in
the summer terms or second semesters of the academic year,
because your supervisors and examiners will normally be away
on holiday, conferences or research trips throughout the long
210 ◆AUTHORING A PHD