148 12 Beyond the Thesis
working schedule that fills not just their days but to some extent their weekends and
evenings. Such a working pattern can be stressful, but is quickly over.
For longer research degrees, in particular Masters and PhDs, a sprint cannot be
successful; few students have the energy or resources to work 70 or 80 h a week for
a year or more. Such degrees truly are a marathon. An effective pattern is as follows.
At the beginning, expect to work at a steady pace—if you are studying full-time,
this will be little different, in most cases, from the kind of pattern people have in an
office job. Maintain some outside interests and a social life, but make sure they do
leave enough time for your study.
For research students who have come straight from an undergraduate degree,
such working habits may be a big change. With few deadlines or regular commit-
ments such as lectures, the pressures that drove engagement with study are com-
pletely removed. A student on a scholarship, who may have had irregular part-time
work, may also be free of the need to follow a regular daily routine, and worse, very
possibly developed a habit of working a light week during semester and cramming
during exams.
My student Jack came to his PhD with bad habits of this kind, and in particular
had developed an extraordinary number of activities outside study, including com-
petitive sport (inline skating), performing in the local music scene, writing educa-
tional software, and a full list of social engagements with his soon-to-be wife. He
was also something of an addict of computer gaming; coping with this problem is a
real challenge for any student whose study involves sitting in front of a computer—
rather like being an alcoholic who has to work in a bar. Somehow he had maintained
all of these things throughout his undergraduate years, in part, I suspect, because the
stop–start pattern of coursework meant that he could switch between his different
interests. As a research student, it soon put him on a course for failure; he would
have gotten into difficulty with far less distraction that this. He eventually resolved
his issues by taking a year off to build his bank balance; taking his marriage seri-
ously (he adopted a more responsible attitude because of the sacrifices his wife was
making for his studies); giving up the software development; and scaling back the
music to a couple of gigs a month. The most important change was a resolve to be in
the lab or at his desk for eight hours a day, usually from nine to five, with other time
completely free to use as he chose. He finished with a strong thesis, but, including
the year off, ended up taking 2 years longer than he had originally planned.
The first months of a Masters or PhD tend to be fairly exploratory, not just of the
topic but of what works and what doesn’t in terms of working habits. I discussed
some of these issues in Chap. 4. Part of the solution is to begin to build a realistic
schedule of work, which should become increasingly detailed as you progress. Tasks
for the next few months should have weekly or fortnightly milestones; if they don’t,
they need to be further broken down. This schedule should evolve into a timetable
for submission, focused on your planned completion date. (And it should include
some planned breaks from study of a week or two. We all need holidays). Use this
initial period to develop working habits, and life habits, which will take you through
not just the early familiarization phase of the degree but also the ‘long middle’, that
period that seems distant from the start and distant from the end—when the work