summer vacations. In Britain the blanked-out space where you
cannot usually get your thesis examined runs from mid-June to
the end of September, and in the USA from May to the end of
August. Thus the PhD examining ‘year’ runs de facto for only
eight months. In addition it is obviously a bad idea to plan on
submitting in the last two months of this northern hemisphere
‘year’ (after Easter). If your timetable slips you may not get your
manuscript finished early enough to allow sufficient reading time
for the examiners before the long summer limbo is imminent.
The formality and typical slow pace of the submission and
examination process reflects its importance and irreversibility.
In many universities you can make only two attempts to be
granted a doctorate. If you fail once you are ‘referred’ by the
examiners. You then have a last chance to make changes and to
resubmit within a specified time period (usually 18 months or
two years). If you are referred a second time this is the end of
the line for your doctoral hopes. In other universities there may
be a theoretical possibility of having more than two attempts to
get your thesis accepted as a doctorate. But in practice examin-
ers will very rarely accept an open-ended process, so the effect
is the same. Sometimes universities can offer a ‘consolation’
lower rank degree (usually called an M.Phil. in Britain) to can-
didates whose work just cannot make the PhD standard.
Because you have only two bites at the cherry, it is very
important that you do not submit before your supervisors
advise that you have a good chance of passing. Some university
regulations allow PhD candidates to submit whether or not
their supervisors believe that they are ready, but it would nor-
mally be foolish to do so. Very rarely supervisors may for some
reason try to hold you back from submitting a thesis that is in
fact already viable. But this happens only where personal rela-
tions between the student and her supervisors have deterio-
rated badly, and you should always be able to find alternative
sources of advice in your department. An equally rare problem
might occur if your supervisor or head of department tries to
pressure you into submitting too early, before you feel ready.
Some government funding bodies around the world require
that PhDs which they fund are submitted within a specified
time (usually four years), and levy penalties on departments
which fail to comply. Theoretically such rules (or internal
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