DBA news in May: it's getting very near the end

I spent most of last weekend working again on my thesis, mainly adding summary sections to each chapter, but generally trying to improve the text and make the points as clear as can be. I uploaded the thesis to my supervisor who responded within a few days saying that the work was very good although that he had made a few minor changes. I had to scour the thesis looking for these and the only one which I could find relatively easily was the changing of a section title from 'Research failures' (i.e. topics which didn't work out as I had expected) to 'Research hindsights' - except that he wrote 'hindsights' with a grocer's apostrophe, i.e. hindsight's (when I pointed this out to him, he said that he was pleased that I found the deliberate mistake).

Afraid that I might have missed something more important, I tried to find out how I could display all the changes made in the document. Eventually I discovered that Review > Track changes > Reviewing pane would open a window with all the changes. Well, my supervisor did say that his changes were minor: capitalising a few words and hyphenating some, such as seven-stage.

He said that now was the time to get a second critique before the final submission and so on Thursday I uploaded the thesis as it currently stands. I contacted the DBA administrator to tell him of the upload and to request a reasonably quick response - last time it took five weeks to get the review - so I was surprised this morning to receive an email saying that there is only one review of the final thesis, and that "The next step, provided your supervisor is happy that you have addressed the previous feedback, is to submit your thesis for examination". So I suppose that the writing-up stage has now been completed!!!

I shall have to get used to the feeling that this is the final product. Externally I'm pleased because I will be able to submit a bound thesis during the period for which I have paid my fees (another month) - over the past few days I had been considering how to pay fees for another six months. Internally the doubt starts to creep in: impostor's syndrome.

The only minor problem remaining is that a submission/certification form has to be inserted after the acknowledgments in the thesis. What I will do is create a pdf version of the thesis, split it after ten pages into two new documents, then merge the first split, the form and the second split into a new document. Fortunately I have a program that will do this without any bother.