All work and no play made Jack a dull boy. This adage proves well for PhD students as well. Like all professionals, they ideate well when they plan a holiday. However, in the entire process, they need to make sure that the work doesn’t suffer. Hence, the support of the supervisor could work miracles here.

If a supervisor encourages you to take breaks and if she knows that your work won’t suffer, then you should take a break but only for a period she has suggested.

However, a right process should be followed in a right manner to ensure that you don’t follow a wrong path.

Here are a few points you should try to remember to plan your break:

1. Take permission: Make sure to ask your supervisor that you want to avail your entitled annual leave.

2. Ensure your work doesn’t suffer: Next point to remember is that you are not availing your break at the cost of your work.

3. Commit to your work before your break: Before you go for your work, your should know the schedule of your supervisor. Also, you should make sure that you commit and finish your work before you get into another world.

4. Give your contact details to your supervisor: Let your supervisor know the details of the world you are into. This will help him to trace you during emergency scenario.

5. Complete your formalities: There are some department formalities that should be completed to avail the entitled holidays. Make sure that you don’t leave any of those formalities incomplete. As your supervisor is answerable in your absence, make sure you don’t put him in an awkward situation.

Hence, live a normal human life and follow certain precautions to enjoy breaks while pursuing PhD.

The main aim of the cover letter to the editor is to publish your paper to the journal in first attempt so you must write it nicely. Utmost care should be taken to attract the editor’s attention and provide a reason for sending your paper out for external peer review.

Tips for writing a good cover letter:

Address the editor-in-chief (EIC) by name which implies that you know the journal’s editorial committee and have bothered to check. Ensure that your letter is not too short or too long and that it does not simply repeat the abstract. Highlight the novel aspect of your work and why the journal readership would find this important. Indicate why this work fits the journal’s scope.

Make sure your cover letter contains these sentences: We confirm that this manuscript has not been published elsewhere and is not currently under consideration by another journal. All authors have approved the manuscript and agree with its submission to this journal.

Manuscript submission and editorial handling

Choosing a suitable journal is an important aspect of publishing your scientific work. Therefore, you should check the aims, interests, scope, etc. of the journal in question. Follow the author guidelines to avoid delays because of the lack of adherence to journal submission instructions.

Once your manuscript is received by the online system, it will be scrutinized carefully by the editorial assistant. Then the EIC will assess your manuscript and, unless the work is very poor, will assign it to an associate editor who is a member of the editorial committee. The associate editor will assess the manuscript and the main decision at that stage will be to send it out for external peer review or to reject it without such a review. However, if your manuscript is deemed worthy of external peer review, then you have clearly attracted the attention of the editors and pitched the work to an appropriate journal, regardless of the final outcome.

Doctorate dissertation is a challenge for all the scholars, hardly matters from which background they are. As, writing dissertation is not a big deal, but writing an acceptable and appreciating dissertation is definitely a tough task, hence it becomes a challenge for the scholars. Also, professors consider each and every point as required and mentioned in their university guideline, which makes the task doubly difficult. While very few dissertations are appreciated and are considered as ready for submission, whereas many dissertations are rejected and remaining others are subject to be re-checked. So, why not look on the points which are most searched by the professors and are esteemed by them while checking a dissertation, to give it firsthand green signal –

• Go through your university guideline before you start because this is the only template which your professors will consider the most. Understand the demands and requirements as mentioned in it and then plan accordingly starting from deciding a topic till concluding it.

• Keep your dissertation short and simple. Scholars often consign to sum up by writing long and critical dissertation, but this is the first blunder they commit. Remember, lengthier is the dissertations more are the flaws and fluffs in it, which are highly exasperating for a professor, thus evade this gaffe.

• Be correct on language elements of English grammar which includes vocabulary,  spellings and correct sentence formation comprehensive of punctuations. But, if you are not confident enough in your English then you can also take help from many dissertation services presentation online and offline to serve the purpose. Also, focus on alignment, fonts and spacing of words, lines and paragraphs before submitting your dissertation.

These, were some important and crucial points which a professor looks while checking a dissertation and if you have considered all these while writing, your dissertation will be undoubtedly accepted.

Can we work around a holiday plan for PhD scholars? Where would it leave their work? Well, when I write this, I am on my annual leave as a PhD scholar, ironically. But I would also like to insist and say that it is working because of my supervisor. She has encouraged me to take breaks as long as I informed her well in advance and did not do it at the cost of my work. With her encouragement and clear discussion with her, it worked for me. But like how I said, it worked only because of her. Read between the lines. You get a holiday, if your supervisor thinks you need a holiday. How do we generalise this? We cannot but surely we can generalise the ways in which we can keep the bosses happy. After all, they are bosses for that stipulated tenure.

Having a supervisor, who is flexible and accommodating, I surely afford holidays and even if you are on a similar pedestal, do not forget some important, unsaid rules and regulations. You may get a break, but it needs to be a process. A step by step, informal process! Let me explain this better:

1. Always ask your supervisor your entitled annual leave.
2. Take her opinion on the most suitable time to take offs, so as to ensure that you wouldn’t do it at the cost of your work. Remember, this is critical and may affect your relations with her n a great way.
3. Know, or try to know, your supervisors leave schedule.
4. Ensure, commit and do finish all decided work before you zoom out into another world. Else in the eyes of the supervisor, it isn’t any less than a sin.
5. Whichever alien world you are into, remember there is an alien waiting you in another world that should know where you are and should be able to contact you. Yes, we do dislike our supervisors having your contact details on holidays, and fear them spoiling the mood, but we got to give them that right, privilege. If you are as lucky as me, he won’t disturb you on an official break , unless an emergency.
6. Do remember, there are some department formalities that need to be completed to avail the entitled holidays. Don’t leave any of that incomplete. In your absence, your supervisor is answerable for you and putting him in an awkward situation is outing your degree in one.

So in all, doing a PhD, gives you the right to have a normal human life. Live it up with some caution. That’s it!!

As you begin to take courses of a higher level, you may be distressed to find out that most of your scores are based on one major project in the entire course, which is your research paper. Moreover, you may have not written anything longer than a few pages. Here are a few tips to help you write a winning research paper.

Know what your guide wants

Before you can venture out into writing your research paper, you should consider knowing what your guide wants from you. Go through your assignment several times. Mark or underline the action words such as analyze, describe, compare, etc. that have been given to you. Find out whether your teacher wants you to present an argument and if so, you should provide support for your argument with regards to the research question. If you are not sure, talk to him or her right away.

Begin planning the paper

Begin by defining a good topic. If you do it well at the beginning, then it will save you a lot of time and some heartache later on. You would, however, need to remember to do some preliminary research before selecting a topic. Think of how long you want the essay to be and what your research guide expects from you. It is always a smart choice to talk to your research guide about your problems. In case your guide is not available, tell your classmate or your tutor the problems you are facing. Once you have decided the topic, you might be urged to jump in even though you would have to resist the urge to do so. Write down everything you know about the topic and then, prepare a list of questions that you would like answered in your research paper. Do not delay the writing process by dragging it on for weeks on end, but try to finish it off within a certain time.

We know that tutoring is always helpful, and students need it too. Students doing their master’s, PhD’s, doctoral dissertation etc. need specialized care from their tutors and mentors. Here in our blog, we have provided some meaning information about the important areas to be covered while giving tuitions to doctorate students.

A) Moral Support

Moral support of family and tutors is a foremost thing which is very important for a student. This will help a student to stay focused, motivated, and to be on schedule. Without goals and schedule a student is never able to end up their dissertation on time. There should be a moral support and motivation for a student to develop a stringent timeline with measurable goals.

B) Development of Topic

Students always face trouble picking a topic or cutting down the topic to the right meaning. A tutor can always help here. Having years of work experience, a tutor can suggest number of topic to student according to the research area.

C) Help provided for Statistics

A student always needs a tutor help for statistics, as it doesn’t come naturally.  A tutor can quickly help a student to get through all of the statistics they need to terminate their work with outstanding quality.

D) Search for the article and its summarization

Searching the articles can be very mind-numbing and time consuming. A tutor can help student searching the write article without wasting countless hours. They can also help in right summarization of article with definite variables and their relationships.

E) Help provided for grammatical proofreading

A second eye is always needed for a students’ work. There may be small grammatical mistakes that a student could make. Sometimes the sentence framing is not so good. A tutor can help a student with suggestions, corrections, and comments. Tutor can also guide a student for the tools needed for grammatical proofreading.

One of the questions that scholars get asked is why they chose a certain research methodology and did not opt for another method. This can be a commonly asked question if there are two or three well known methodologies in a particular discipline. It can also be a question asked of people if they were to choose an unusual method for their research rather than the generally known ways of collecting information.

This will be a question that the dissertation students have to defend in their viva voce and they will have to defend it in a clever and convincing manner. Many students tend to get confused when this particular question comes up. Some of them turn to methodologists for help.

The methodologists offer many types of assistance and explaining research methodology is one of them. The students are given help and taught to compare different methodologies, and over the course of time are made to understand the nuances of different methodologies. In the company of the methodologist they analyze why one method is better than another method, and how they can express this fact cogently in front of the review board.

Explaining the rationale behind a certain research methodology is essential because if that is not correct then it means that all the data that is collected by the researchers is incorrect. That would bring into question the very basis on which the students have arrived at their conclusions. It is best to sit with the subject matter experts before the project and even during the viva voce preparation to formulate an answer that would impress the university review board. When the interviewers start asking their questions, the students would be in a position to give confident answers as to why they chose a particular approach to their project.