• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Thesis writing

yucatanboy2

yucatanboy2

Bluelighter
Joined
Jan 15, 2006
Messages
1,913
Location
Crazytown USA
Hi people,

wanted to start a thread about writing theses. Anyone writing one (undergrad/masters/Phd)? Are you proud of your work? How do you go about writing/editing it? Do you write it at the last minute or spread it out? I just turned in my PhD thesis to my committee (200+ pages), and I pulled two all nighters this week to finish it (I'm a procrastinator). There are errors, but I can fix them later as this wasn't the final draft.
 
I'm about 2/3 of the way through my thesis. There are some bits I'm proud of and some sections that still need a lot of work.

Usually, with every bit of work I've done in the past its always been a last minute job. However, with this I started well in advance and worked on it harder than anything else I've ever worked on previously.

Aiming to submit in Feburary so still got plenty of time to finish it off. I think if I keep up the pace and keep working on it, then by the time I come to submit I should be fairly happy with it. I know the structure of all the chapters and know roughly what I want to say and how to say it, but just have to dig through the previous work and find refs etc.

Sure, I'll no doubt spot errors as soon as its handed in. But I think that happens to everyone.

How long did it take you to complete all in all? Can you tell me what topic it was about?
 
^ good job! Keep it up. I found it really helpful to get other people to read through sections to see if things made sense to them.

Mine was chemistry, based on my research, so I had done all the work already, and it was just compiling it from my lab notebooks and working on intros/literature/etc. I think I spent a good 2 months just working on it (writing chapters, giving them to labmates/my boss/revising them). Might have been 3 months... i've kind of lost track of time in general.
 
I've drafted about four chapters of my PhD thesis. I'm proud of my work, but one issue I'm facing is that I'm coming at my topic from a perspective that is very different from those already established, and so I'm having trouble making it intelligible for people who aren't versed in the kind of theory that I use. It's something to work on, it's really just about linking it to current debates in a coherent and meaningful way.

I just sit down and write every weekday except when I'm doing paid work. I'm drafting chapters and then once I've got a full draft I'll get my supervisors to go over it with a fine toothed comb and then hopefully that'll be it. I'm aiming to submit in May 2011.

It's a terrifying prospect really. Submitting the PhD will be the end of my fairly stable life up to now. And the academic job market is hardly inviting.
 
Guess my writing hasn't been going as well as I first thought - had my first paper rejected a few days ago.

To be fair, the majority of the comments were valid and I received a lot of constructive feedback. Even now the paper is looking much stronger and I can apply all of it to my thesis. And I'd much prefer to have my work torn to pieces now rather then in my viva ;)

What did concern me though there were a fair few comments from one reviewer (the harshest one) that seemed to state I should have included and explained things that had already been extensively covered in the original draft? Slightly confused and frustrated me :\

Again though, congrats Yutacan - hopefully I'll be meeting up with you for a few beers in Cali sometime next year :D
 
I've had two papers rejected in my candidature. Don't worry about it. A PhD is about learning how to do that. You'll get there eventually. I had one accepted earlier this year and I have the first revision of another under review at the moment that I'm confident enough. My problem was trying to get published too early when my thinking was not mature enough. You'll learn how to write for journals, (and how to play the game) soon enough.
 
I've had papers rejected, but you just revise/resubmit or send to a different journal. Such is life. You'll still get a publication out of it.

I think part of getting a phd is learning how to be abused and not fall apart from it.

By the way, I PASSED MY FINAL EXAM yesterday! BOOYAH! I am now very close to being a doctor, just gotta do the revisions and get the signatures, and turn in my thesis to the school!!!
 
Aye, within about 2 mintues I realised that in the long run it would make for a stronger publication once I'd taken on aboard the comments from the reviewers. Plus 2 out of the 4 seemed to like the work and thought the experiments were well designed, had a well testable hypothesis and interesting findings, so that was a winner.

Got the revised draft completed and it looks much better, just waiting on the comments back from a co-author and it'll be resubmitted.

More importantly though, congrats Yutacan! Apart from the obvious outcome, how was the viva? How long did it take etc?
 
I'd rather not say to be honest, too close to identifying information given that I've already posted stuff in the past about my discipline and thesis topic. It's not directly related to my thesis but it comes from it indirectly. But I think it's going to be a decent book - published by one of the biggest publishers in the field and it looks like it's going to have a lot of content so that's great.

However, I've just been told by one of the editors that one of my PhD supervisors also submitted a proposal for a chapter in the same book and got knocked back. So that's awkward.
 
Touche, I totally understand.

Congrats though, despite the awkwardness concerning your supervisor, it must be pretty satisfying nonetheless having your contribution accepted. Plus I'm sure your superivisor is pretty damned happy for you :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top