Dissertation revisions
Most of you know that I successfully defended my PhD research in December.
What I’m going through now is pretty typical (at least for my institution): I’m revising and refining parts of the document according to comments and suggestions from committee members.
My dissertation comprises three chapters, each of which is a stand-alone paper designed to be submitted to a journal. When I have more time, and when it’s all officially over, I’ll outline each in much more detail. But, for now, I’m going to discuss them more generally.
Chapter 1 was originally submitted last July. The first reviews came back a few days before my defense, which was actually good timing. So, now I’m looking at those peer reviews combined with reviews from my committee members. Essentially, I can revise the manuscript for the journal and, at the same time, clean up what will be the dissertation version.
Chapter 2 doesn’t need too much refinement for the dissertation, but still needs work before it’s ready to submit to a journal. It’s too long and too dissertation-chapter-esque.
Chapter 3, which is the work I presented at AGU last month, was submitted over the holiday break! I’m very excited about this paper…we’ll see how excited I am when reviews come back trashing it. For the dissertation, however, this one is done. Done. The version that I submitted a couple weeks ago will be the one in the dissertation.
My research job with The Man starts in less than a month, so it looks like Chapter 2 might not be ready for journal submission before I start there. This is not ideal…but it happens. Getting two-thirds of my PhD work submitted before leaving is pretty good. I tried.
To be honest, I’m having a difficult time getting my head fully into these revisions. I need a break…I deserve a break. But, I need to keep at it.
Almost there…stay on target.
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Clastic Detritus 
When at that stage I always had this Robert Frost line in my head:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
Either that or the “Stay on target” being repeated from the end of Star Wars.
Getting 2/3 of things submitted is excellent. Nice work!
Congrats on passing the defense and your new job. I have catching up on blog reading the past few days after an extended holiday hiatus, so missed your defense announcement. Publishing two out of three papers before starting your job sounds great to me.
Good luck submitting- I only got one of my PhD papers in, and I still haven’t fixed up the other stuff of resubmitted that one after it got trashed.
As for my thesis revisions, they mostly comprised fixing 50 incorrect uses of “data” as a singular noun. :(
Lab Lemming…that’s pretty good to only have incorrect usage to revise…nice work.
The reviewers were generally happy- -although the really pedantic one said that I had to change the verb “mined” to “recovered” as carbonado had no economic value. And there was only one cite-napping. The system works differently here than in the US though- it is basically the same peer review that a paper gets, and you only need to defend if your thesis is seriously flawed- flying reviewers in from halfway around the world costs $$$, so they don’t like to do that.