Intermediate thesis accepted!!

Following is the text of a letter which I received from the university today.

Dear No’am

I trust you are well.

The Doctoral Review Committee considered your intermediate thesis at their meeting this morning. I am delighted to inform you that they consider it to be of a very good standard and are happy for you to proceed to the main study.

You will soon receive detailed feedback from the reviewers via your supervisor. You are encouraged to discuss the feedback with your supervisor and address any issues to your supervisor’s satisfaction before progressing to the next stage.

Obviously it's a good idea to have undertaken a failed doctoral project before embarking on a successful one. The first time around, it took me eight months and one and a half attempts to get my research proposal accepted; second time, it took about three months, fighting my mentor almost all the way, to have the proposal accepted at its first meeting. The first time, it took about two years and two attempts to have the intermediate thesis accepted; second time, it took exactly one year and one attempt!

Of course, it's not such a good idea to have a failed project as it ate time and money which could have been put to better purposes. On the other hand, the experience gained from failing allowed me to know in advance what I needed to know in order to succeed. 

So what lies ahead? First, I have to see the detailed feedback - I suspect that the paragraph about feedback in the letter is boilerplate. Assuming that there is nothing serious there, the next step is to start the interviewing process. At the same time, I have to discuss how results will be presented in the thesis. It would have been much clearer how to present results in a thesis based on statistics which prove or disprove hypotheses.