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The best way to write a PhD thesis is to not write one. Instead, spend your time writing articles and getting them into journals. You should be able to produce
by scottfr 12y ago
The best way to write a PhD thesis is to not write one.
Instead, spend your time writing articles and getting them into journals. You should be able to produce roughly one published article a year [0]. When you have 3-4 published or near published articles, take them and put them together into a dissertation.
Most universities will allow this and it's the approach to developing a dissertation that minimizes your risk (you don't bet everything on one experiment, you minimize the risk of last minute critiques and requests for changes, etc...).
[0] This might seem intimidating when you start out, but if you want a promising future in academia you will eventually need to be producing 5, 10 or more articles a year (with admittedly a lot of collaboration and assistance from other). Setting a strict goal of one article a year as a grad student should be obtainable in most fields and get you on the right track. It will also force you to be disciplined and to produce. When of the biggest risk for grad students is trying to be too perfect or too "big" in their work.
- danieltillett 12y agoI used this approach. My University would not allow me to just put all my publications together and submit it, so I just added a general introduction at the front and a general conclusion on the end and then made each of my publications a chapter. The only problem comes with the papers that are not solely your own work. I got around this by putting in the preface what I had done in each chapter. It did meant that my thesis was a bit longer than it might have been as it had work that was not mine, but the examiners didn't seem to mind and it had the fortunate side effect of making my thesis a better doorstop.
- zmmmmm 12y agoI agree with this, but I also feel torn by it. A PhD is one of the few opportunities in academia to do true, unconstrained, open ended research. With no hard deadline, no constant "publish or perish" pressure, students can take a bit more risk and look a bit further over the event horizon than other researchers who have to make every bit of research count towards a publication. Students don't realise it because they are so focused on getting through, but this opportunity doesn't come again. You are suggesting they should jump straight on to the slavish publication treadmill that academics already spend their lives on. In a pragmatic sense it's good advice, but it's also failing to make the most of the opportunity presented by a PhD. Maybe I'm just idealistic.
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- kijin 12y ago> A PhD is one of the few opportunities in academia to do true, unconstrained, open ended research. No, that's what you do after you've got tenure.
- anologwintermut 12y agoAfter you have tenure and a couple of grad students who believe in "A PhD is one of the few opportunities in academia to do true" ...
- angersock 12y agoAll of the PhD students I know are constantly under "publish or perish" pressure, in addition to the open-ended research work--which usually is only as open as their advisor's pedigree and experience will allow. Industry seems to be much easier to get crazy ideas done in.
- tedks 12y agoAnd this is why academics are busy stomping out 3% speedups in arcane bullshit nobody cares about while startups and BigCorps are getting actual research done and pushing computing in new, exciting directions.
- scott_s 12y agoI felt no such freedom in grad school. I was constantly aware that I needed to write a cohesive dissertation, and that I needed to "own" it. This encourages students to continue working on a project just because it's "far enough" along, even though the student may have concluded its actual utility is lower than other projects. It also discouraged true, equal collaboration because the student must own that work enough to claim it as their own. Personally, I feel I have much more freedom not having the dissertation hanging over me head.
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- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThere is no best way to write a PhD thesis. The best PhD thesis I have ever read is a cohesive whole with only a couple of < 5 page papers to be found related to it by the author (everyone should check it out, it is really good!): https://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf https://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf You can tell the author was really in to what he was doing and expressing himself; it was not just a rush to graduate (my own dissertation is boring by comparison). Sure, going the "staple the papers/articles together" approach is safer and common at some popular schools (e.g. UCB), but is it really better for humanity and the advancement of science? As a finished-my-phd-long-ago researcher, I personally pace myself at publishing one good article a year (I might work on others in collaboration, but nowhere near being the primary author). Producing just for the sake of producing is a big problem in academia, and seriously decreases the signal-to-noise ratio.
- GuiA 12y agoThe Media Lab is a particular institution though; I'm not certain what works for PhD students there would uniformly apply to just any PhD students.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoAs someone else said, your dissertation realm doesn't matter, so you have to work extra hard to make it count. Its usually up to your committee to accept or reject it.
- thearn4 12y agoI can second this, this was my approach (as insisted upon by my professor). This only really works in some fields though - formal sciences (math, cs, etc) where you can make your own data from thin air. If you have an IRB to go through, it's a bit of a different story.