I was allowed to gong our office good-news-gong today! A good-news-gong is a must for any office in my opinion.
It can sometimes be hard for wins to truly feel like wins in a hardworking office, so we bought a gong (problem solved!). Second only to handing in the full PhD, the submission of a paper is top of the gong worthy event in our office (except for maybe having a kid, that’s happened to a fair few of us here).
You can’t beat that moment after you’ve submitted a paper. It’s the sweet spot that comes directly after a whole tonne of relentless, soul destroying work, and directly before an automated rejection email. If you’re really lucky, the journals automated rejection system is down for the day and they actually read the paper and send it out to reviewers, and if they’re drunk or in an inexplicably happy mood they might allow it to be published (after they point out all the ways it could be better, of course).
Today’s paper is the fourth of four that I need for my PhD. This is how my PhD progress currently looks:
Paper 1:- Published, here it is: Measuring trust in vaccination: A systematic review
Paper 2:- Submitted and accepted, currently working on comments that I should have re-submitted last week but I asked for an extension, now due 12th of April
Paper 3:- Submitted and accepted, currently working on comments that I need to resubmit by next Wednesday
Paper 4:- Submitted
All that’s left after wrapping up the papers is:
Write an introduction explaining why the hell anyone would bother doing all this work
Write a synthesis chapter that brings together the findings across all the papers and explain what in the hell all this work means
Turn it into a physical book and hand that book over to the uni that passes on to my examiners
Defend my work in a Viva, which sounds more action packed than it really is. Its actually just the most nerdy conversion I'm ever likely to be in, talking about my stats and whatnot.
