What’s the point of the PhD thesis?

Doctoral courses are slowly being modernized. Now the thesis and viva need to catch up.

On the morning of Tom Marshall's PhD defence, he put on the suit he had bought for the occasion and climbed onto the stage in front of a 50-strong audience, including his parents and 6 examiners. He gave a 15-minute-long presentation, then faced an hour of cross-examination about his past 5 years of neuroscience research at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. A lot was at stake: this oral examination would determine whether he passed or failed. “At the one-hour mark someone came in, banged a stick on the floor and said 'hora est',” says Marshall — the ceremonial call that his time was up. “But I couldn't. I had enjoyed the whole experience far too much, and ended up talking for a few extra minutes.”

Marshall's elaborate, public PhD assessment is very different from that faced by Kelsie Long, an Earth-sciences PhD candidate at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Her PhD will be assessed solely on her written thesis, which will be mailed off to examiners and returned with comments. She will do a public presentation of her work later this year, but it won't affect her final result. “It almost feels like a rite of passage,” she says.

Read more: What’s the point of the PhD thesis?

Source: nature

How to Write a Better Thesis, 3rd edition

From proposal to examination, producing a dissertation or thesis is a challenge. Grounded in decades of experience with research training and supervision, this fully updated and revised edition takes an integrated, down-to-earth approach drawing on case studies and examples to guide you step-by-step towards productive success.

Early chapters frame the tasks ahead and show you how to get started. From there, practical advice and illustrations take you through the elements of formulating research questions, working with software, and purposeful writing of each of the different kinds of chapters, and finishes with a focus on revision, dissemination and deadlines. How to Write a Better Thesis presents a cohesive approach to research that will help you succeed.

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How to Write a Better Thesis, 3rd edition By David Evans, Paul Gruba,

Justin Zobel 2014 | 184 Pages | ISBN: 3319042858 | PDF | 2 MB

Download: 1. books.google.com.np

                   2. drive.google.com

A Scientific Approach to Scientific Writing

This guide provides a framework, starting from simple statements, for writing papers for submission to peer-reviewed journals. It also describes how to address referees’ comments, approaches for composing other types of scientific communications, and key linguistic aspects of scientific writing.

Essential Steps Before Writing a Paper

Having completed a study and acquired all the data required to present it, you are ready to begin preparing a paper. However, before beginning to write, you have to take several critical preliminary steps: Your notes must be gathered, a suitable place for writing must be found, a selective literature review may be helpful, a target journal must be identified, linguistic limitations must be recognized, the study must be defined and delimited, and the information must be arranged. Failure to take these steps will make writing more difficult and seriously compromise the chances of publication. Therefore, this chapter outlines what needs to be done in each of these steps.

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Download here: 1. www.victoria.ac.nz; 

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Pondering my PhD worth after graduation.

Her PhD on Parkinson’s disease didn’t go exactly as planned, but in the end the difficulties made Liesbeth Aerts a happier scientist.

One year ago today, I found myself in a lecture theatre, presenting my research to a thesis jury. During the years leading up to that moment, there were many days when I worried whether I was ever going to make it that far. When I finally did, most of all, I felt relieved.

Like many others, I had imagined my PhD differently. I was prepared for the hard work and long hours. I thought that if I gave it my all, I would be a successful scientist. My ambitions took a blow when faced with failure after failure. For well over a year, I felt like a fraud, having fooled my supervisors and myself into thinking that I had what it took to become a good scientist. Looking back, I’d tell my younger self to take it easy.

Cut yourself some slack

Even Nobel prize winners were first-year students once. They messed up their experiments, needed help and most likely suffered just as much as you did. Don’t expect to do everything right the first time around. No matter how hard you work and how motivated you are, you’ll need to accept that becoming better takes time and requires failure.

One mistake at a time, I got better, and as time went by, I realised others were making educated guesses just like I was. They too didn’t understand everything during seminars. Could it be that, just maybe, I wasn’t the dumbest person in the room?

Read more: Pondering my PhD worth after graduation.

Source: blogs.nature.com