When I received the final completed questionnaire in October 2022, I thought, this is it. I’ll just analyze the data, spend a few weeks writing the rest of my thesis, and submit before my baby was due in July 2023. Delusional, I know.
I did not realize just how much WORK goes into the writeup of the thesis.
A bit of throwback here. Around the second year of my PhD, I had attended an online webinar on research methodology with a prolific speaker and professor from my university. During the webinar, the professor stressed that for social sciences research, new researchers are strongly recommended to NOT embark on mixed methods research. He said that if we do the study well, each method can stand as its own PhD study.
Of course, by then, I had already planned to do mixed methods research. I was dealing with imposter’s syndrome. I wasn’t convinced that my research was substantial enough to be a PhD, or that the scope was broad or targeted enough. And so, my mindset was that it was better I do too much than too little. Rather than take this prolific professor’s recommendation and amend my study scope, I decided to stay on course and still proceed with what I had planned.
This meant going through ethics approval twice. Developing, piloting, and validating two research instruments. Collecting data twice. Analysing the data twice. Reporting two types of findings. And even having to triangulate between the two.
I don’t regret doing that. But I also did not realize just how much TIME this would add to my PhD.
(Now, having completed the PhD…I could say that actually, only one method would have been enough. That Professor was right. But of course, a PhD is a learning journey, and that was just another hard lesson I had to learn.)
The year was now 2023. I was working on finalizing my PhD thesis, expecting fully that the process would probably just take around six months. It ended up taking a year and a half.
Because I was doing mixed methods, I had essentially two of everything. Two sets of collected data (qualitative and quantitative), two types of data analysis.
My supervisors began giving me back my draft chapters, and with every single draft that was returned, I was humbled even more. I had to rework numerous sections multiple times, and even my table of contents’ arrangement needed corrections! If, before this, I was learning about the intricacies and rigor that goes into research, I was now learning about how academic writing is actually an art on paper that is very deeply unappreciated.
Every time I send a chapter, I’d get it back littered with comments to address and I’d wonder, why hadn’t I thought of ABCDEFG..Z before.
In the midst of revising my thesis and addressing comment after comment from my supervisors, I was also expecting my second baby.
Don’t get me wrong, finding out I was pregnant came as an absolute delight. It was the happiest of news, to me, to hubs, to my son, to my parents and in-laws and everyone else who knew us. My son had just turned five years old, and really…it was about time.
We were still waiting to get the house keys for the new (to us) house that we bought, but we were already transitioning our lives to the new area. We registered Fahim to a preschool nearer to my university. Daily, he’d wake up and get ready with me, and we’d be on the road by 6.30AM for that one-hour commute. He would sleep in the car in the passenger seat, and while I felt guilty about that, I was reassured by my lawyer that we’d get the keys by the end of the first quarter of the year.
And we did. We received the keys on 28th February, 2023.
Two weeks later, on 14th March, we found the contractor who would undertake the major renovations for the house. I was in my second trimester, and let me tell you…it was a journey. During weekends, hubs, Fahim and I would go and buy tiles, water closets (I bet some of you are looking this up and thinking “oh, THAT’s what it’s called”), sinks, shower heads, lights, fans, furniture. It was a lot of work, but it was, to me, so fulfilling.
The renovations began in early April and completed at the end of June.
We moved into the new house on 17th June.
My baby was born on 12th July. I mean, you can imagine just how…tight the schedule was.
Throughout it all, I was still working as usual, and working on my PhD.
I sent a revised version of my Chapter 2 (the literature review) to my supervisors on 17th March.
Then my revised Chapter 1 on 22nd March.
Then my revised Chapter 3 on 10th April. They were already asking me to provide some names of potential examiners around this time.
After the first three chapters, I set to revise the longest chapter of my thesis, which is Chapter 4. That chapter also strongly tied to Chapter 5, where I had to draw my conclusions. Yet, there was a problem. Even though all my chapters by then were technically “complete”, and all my data was already inside the written thesis and analyzed, I was still around 10,000 words below the minimum.
As a student in language studies, the requirement for a PhD thesis is to have between 80,000 to 100,000 words in content alone – excluding the preliminary pages, the references, and the appendices. I was barely scraping 70,000 words at this time and was wondering where, the heck, I could put in another 10,000 words. I mean it’s a LOT of words.
I began to ask people for advice on how to hit that word count. As it is when you ask a lot of people for advice, I received a LOT of tips. None which were inherently helpful. It was actually a thread on Quora that ended up giving me a place to start. The thread said that it’s recommended to have a “budget” word count for each chapter, so that we could figure out how many words at minimum each chapter should have. I found this to be incredibly helpful.
I’m jumping the gun here, but when I ended up submitting my thesis, my word count for content alone was 81,000 words. I had juuuust hit that word count. By chapter, the breakdown goes like this:
- Chapter 1 (Introduction): 5,500 words
- Chapter 2 (Literature Review): 15,000 words
- Chapter 3 (Methodology): 17,000 words (remember I did mixed methods)
- Chapter 4 (Findings and Discussion): 36,500 words
- Chapter 5 (Conclusion): 7,500 words
Now I won’t call myself an expert, not by a long shot, but I dwelled a lot on the word count issue a lot. I have, since my undergraduate student days till today, proofread/edited probably around 30 theses (or more) and have always been frustrated as a reader when the literature review is unnecessarily long and winded. I guess now I understand it’s because it’s the easiest way to hit that minimum word count, but all I can say is…don’t do that.
In my case, when I did my chapter word count budget, I realized that my Chapter 3 needed more words. So that’s where I put in a lot of explanations of my methodology.
If you’re not hitting your word count, I’d say, spend more time on making sure your methodology is sound. As a reader, the methodology cannot be too long as you’re justifying your every decision. So, if you need to put more words, put them in Chapters 3 and 5, not Chapter 2. Readers can tell when the word count is increased in the literature review just for the sake of it.
My baby girl, Nuha Alisha, was born on 12th July, 2023. I joke with my colleagues a lot, because she was born in Week 15 of the semester, which is the study break week before final exams began. My faculty has no final exams, so that meant she was born riiiight after classes ended. I didn’t end up asking anyone to grade my classes on my behalf. I did that during the maternity leave.
Now maternity leave was uneventful. I actually enjoyed it, because to me it meant three months off of work to focus on PhD. It was three months where I could work uninterrupted, and work I did.
Nuha, like her brother, was a contact napper. Any time I try to put her in her crib when she’s asleep, she would wake up. It didn’t matter what I did. I could have her swaddled, or not. I could have the air conditioning on, or not. I could have it be completely silent, or I could turn on a sound machine. Nothing worked, and nothing would get her to sleep…except if she’s in my arms.
So a lot of my maternity leave was spent like this:
(I mean, the fact that I even have picture evidence of this tells you everything you need to know)
On 2nd September, seven weeks after having Nuha, I sent the completed and revised Chapters 1 to 5 to my supervisors. This was the first time I sent the full thesis to them. We went through a few more rounds of corrections until 20th December, when they finally, finally, FINALLY said it’s close to being ready for submission.
Now, thesis submissions work in different ways depending on which university you’re in. For my university, prior to sending in the thesis, a student must first fill in an “Intention to Submit” form, which is basically a three-month notice for when you plan to submit the thesis. There is also a deadline for when you can submit a thesis before a semester ends. Because I had already missed that deadline in December 2023, I needed to wait for the following semester beginning March 2024 before I could send the intention notice.
By then, I had entered the fifth year of my PhD, with the fourth year being purely just…writing and rewriting and reworking the written thesis based on the continuous feedback from my supervisors.
In January 2025, my supervisors said they wanted to do another read-through, one last time. And so they did. With each chapter, there were new comments to address, and so I worked on it. I submitted my Intention to Submit form on May 14th, 2024, which meant that the deadline for me to submit my actual thesis was August 15th, 2024 – the absolute final deadline for that semester.
From that January to August, I spent soooo much time at cafés, re-reading and reworking that thesis. Even though we had a baby, hubs was gracious in giving me those last six months to just get the writing done. It got to a point where I really got to know my thesis intimately, inside out and backwards.
I wish I could say that the thesis writing process went well, and that there was no drama. But of course, that wouldn’t be my PhD story, would it?
In February 2024, I accidentally spilled coffee onto my laptop. Because of course that’s exactly the kind of thing I would do, right? With just five months to go to submit my thesis.
Luckily, the repair shop was able to salvage the laptop. There was an ugly coffee stain on the left side inside of the laptop screen, but at least it worked.
Then, in April, the hinge broke. I sent the laptop to the repair shop again, and again they fixed it.
In May, the hinge broke even more dramatically than it did before that.
Desperate, I messaged the repair shop.
“Please,” I begged, “Just make it last until August. I don’t mind if you put a door hinge on it, just make it last.”
I had to start putting boxes behind the laptop screen to keep it upright, because the hinge would not keep the screen upright. I suppose it was quite a sight. It definitely gave Fahim ideas, who decided to do a parody of what I had to endure.
Cute, huh.
Thankfully they did manage to get new (very unsightly) hinges on it, and I was able to continue using it until submission.
15th August, 2024.
I had slept late the previous night, making changes and amendments, and messaging my supervisors, even until the morning of the 15th. Five years of work culminated to that date, for when I could finally…finally submit my 81,000-word thesis. I asked for permission to work from home because I was so very jittery about submitting it.
The last two things my supervisors and I looked at were the table of contents and the abstract. I asked them to check my abstract one last time at 8.30AM. They went through it, and recommended some changes to be made. I did that almost in a frenzy of nervous energy, and they sent it back to me at 10.41AM.
“How are we doing with the word limit of the abstract?” my supervisor texted me.
Oh, my goodness. I realized I had forgotten to check that. My abstract was 514 words.
I was almost in tears when I pulled up the thesis guidelines to check the abstract word limit. The relief I felt was palpable when I read that it needed to have no less than 250 words, with no word limit as long as it was contained in one page. I informed them that I was within the guidelines for the abstract.
My supervisors said I could submit the thesis.
And I stalled.
I was alone at home. Hubs was at work. Fahim was at preschool. Nuha was at the babysitter’s. I sat in front of my laptop and just stared at the screen, wondering if this was it. If I could really send the thesis.
I called my supervisor. I asked her, could I really do this? Was I really prepared to do this?
She said yes, send it.
So I did. I attached the documents and submitted my thesis, via email, at 2.45PM.
I messaged two people after submitting my thesis.
The first person was my husband.
The second person was my best friend.
My husband immediately suggested we book a hotel for a short staycation, which we did pretty much on the spot.
My best friend replied to my message with a Spotify link to this song:
(I mean it’s absolutely fitting, isn’t it? Haha.)
There was one section of my thesis that I had left empty until the morning of 15th August, and that was the Acknowledgements section. I purposefully left that section blank until the very, very end. I knew I didn’t want to draft it beforehand. I wanted to write it right before submitting the thesis, so that what I wrote would be from the heart…and that was what I did.
I thought it would be fitting to include the Acknowledgements here, because there’s nothing I can write now that could do a better job than what I had written that day on the 15th August.
All praise be to Allah SWT, to Whom belong all things in the heavens and this world. And praise be to Him in the Hereafter. He is All Wise, All-Aware.
It is through the Hand of Allah that I have been blessed with kind, wonderful, helpful, supportive, and encouraging individuals, without whom this thesis would not have been possible to be completed. I first would like to thank my parents and my parents-in-law for their endless love in supporting me throughout this journey.
Next, I would like to thank my wonderful and inspiring supervisors for their patience and dedication in guiding me throughout this journey. The feedback and guidance they have provided are invaluable in allowing me to grow as a researcher, and to improve the quality of this thesis. I also thank my initial supervisors for their guidance in the first two years of my study.
I express my gratitude to Yayasan Tunku Abdul Rahman, for awarding me with the Tunku Abdul Rahman Scholarship to fund me through my academic journey, beginning with my bachelor’s degree. Being a Tunku Scholar is one of the greatest blessings that I have been given in life that has brought me immense joy beyond the scholarship alone.
I thank my friends and family, my siblings and in-laws, and my nieces and nephews for their support, love, and endless words of encouragement. I also would like to thank every single individual who has helped me, directly or indirectly, in the completion of this thesis.
My last words of gratitude are hard to write, simply because no words could ever be close to adequate in conveying my appreciation towards my husband. He is my biggest cheerleader. I thank you, abang, for your patience, your love, and your support. For making me coffee at night, for listening to me when I am down, for celebrating every small success with me, and for giving me words of encouragement during the toughest times of this journey. For taking care of the kids, for cooking dinners for us at night, for sharing all the hardships with me, and for keeping me in your prayers. Without you, I would have been reduced into a puddle of tears long ago.
Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my sweet, wonderful children. To my son, who asked me which keys to press on my laptop so he could help me write this thesis: you have been with me since the beginning, and have grown up with this journey. To my daughter, you were born in the midst of this journey, and had slept in my lap in the first few weeks of your life as I typed away. To you both, who have shown me the true meaning of life, this thesis would have been meaningless without you. Therefore – I dedicate this to you.
On 13th December 2024, almost four months after submitting the thesis, I was informed that my viva would be held on 23rd December.
Little did I know, that date would turn out to be…one of the saddest days of my life.