7 years, 1 month and 4 days later...

This is a post I’ve been waiting to write for a very long time. A very, very, long time. As I’ve been waiting so long I’m going to start with the good news: on the 30th October 2012 I finally received confirmation that my examiners had accepted my PhD corrections and I should be approved for my degree. I’m Dr Martin Chorley.

Exactly how long I’ve been waiting to write this depends on your point of view. I’ve definitely been waiting eagerly for 1 month and 2 days, pretty certain that this day was coming. I’ve been waiting pretty expectantly for 3 months and 21 days, fairly sure that the day is coming soon. I’ve been really desperate to be able to write this for 1 year, 6 months and 10 days, unsure whether I’d ever be able to. But ultimately, I guess as it’s been exactly 7 years, 1 month and 4 days since I started my PhD, I’ve been waiting for this moment for at least that long (even though I wasn’t blogging back then, and certainly didn’t expect to be writing a bunch of posts like these!).

So, why did it take so long, and why was I waiting for so many different lengths of time? It’s a long story, so I’ll split it over several posts, but the basic facts are that I did badly, tried to fix it, didn’t fix it well enough, so had to fix it again. It’s finally done now, and I can move on with all the rest of the stuff I’ve got to do.