university performance indicators) might lead departments to
pressure lagging students to submit theses prematurely or to
chance their arm with theses which are in fact marginal. On the
other hand, some students also fall into the trap of unrealistic
perfectionism, over-postponing the time when they should
submit. The optimal position to aim for is one where you and
your supervisors are both happy for submission to go ahead.
In the United States and other countries which use a
committee system of supervision there is really no separate
examination stage here. Your advisers and dissertation commit-
tee are also the examiners who have to sign off the doctorate as
worthy of entering the cannon of certified academic research.
One or more of them may have difficulties or hang-ups about
reaching ‘closure’ on your project. This may require you to
work more closely with the most sympathetic members of the
committee, to ensure that you are constructively meeting any
misgivings of the other members. But the personalities
involved are all very familiar to you in this system and you
should be able to fine-tune when you should produce a finished
text for their consideration.
In British-style and Commonwealth university systems and
some European countries, however, PhD examiners are by defi-
nition senior people in your discipline who have notpreviously
been involved in advising you in any way. Their sole task is to
decide independently if your work meets the doctoral criteria or
not. Here you need to think ahead about choosing people to be
examiners, or at least trying to influence whom your supervisor
or the university’s faculty board choose. The point of asking
you ahead of time to specify a title and an abstract is so that
when your thesis is finally submitted the faculty board already
has examiners appointed who have agreed to read the thesis
and to conduct an oral exam (where this is necessary, as it usu-
ally is). University regulations require two or more people to sit
in judgement, one an internal examiner from your own uni-
versity and one or more an external examiner from a com-
pletely different university. Normally both the external and the
internal examiners must not have advised you or been associ-
ated with your work beforehand. (In the University of London
the concern for impartiality is carried so far that even the inter-
nal examiner is normally required to come from another
212 ◆AUTHORING A PHD