I finally submitted my PhD thesis last week. It has been a crazy final month. The reason I had that deadline was that here in Singapore (at least at NTU) all PhD students are given 4 years of funding in which to research and write their thesis. If your four years end before your thesis is completed, you are required to pay tuition for the remaining semesters that you continue writing.

Additionally, part of the requirement for the linguistics division (I think also for some of the other divisions in Humanities) is that you have to take 6 courses, which I did in my first year. So I only started doing research on Pnar 3 years ago, which is not much time in which to write a grammatical description of a language. Despite that fact, I managed to write a grammatical description of Pnar that totals about 550 pages of description and 100 pages of texts and appendices. So I’m pretty proud of that - though the description still needs a lot of work to clarify analyses and fix mistakes.

I used LyX/LaTeX to write and format the thesis, and I thought it might be useful to other students at NTU or those who use LyX in general if I included some of the files that I created for formatting purposes.

So here is the LyX file that you could use to write your thesis: NTU_PhD_Thesis_template.lyx

And this is the PDF that it can generate: NTU_PhD_Thesis_template.pdf

Of course this doesn’t include my actual PhD, but that’s partly because it’s under examination. The next step in the process is to wait for comments from the examiners and then work furiously to incorporate them into the document, before I can resubmit and hopefully set a date for defense and confirmation of the actual degree. At least at the moment I’m feeling much more free!