Recently I was reading the PhD thesis of my student, Veselin. He was going to have his examination and so I was looking through a draft. He recently received a fellowship to go to do a postdoc abroad and so has decided that it’s best to write up and get everything done before it gets too late into the Summer. His new job requires him to have a PhD, of course. (He was, I’m happy to report, successfully doctored (as it were), after an excellent performance in his exam.)
I recall being in the same situation myself, 16 years ago. (Wow, so long…) Happy memories. I got a fellowship to go to my first postdoc in the mythical land across the sea, where so much of the wonderful physics I’d been studying was done by the giants of the field. I was going to get to go there and join them. But I had to write up and graduate first.
I loved writing (and, as you may have noticed, still do) and so relished the prospect. I procrastinated an awful lot (as I do…) for a while before getting down to it, even managing to catch chicken pox for a while (which helped keep me at home for a bit, usefully), and then eventually settled down to it. I essentially locked myself away at home for three or four solid weeks, with a little computer, in my room at the top of the stairs at the back of the little house on Burgess Road (Southampton) that had the lovely and productive apple tree. After that intense time, I emerged with a complete thesis.
To give proper perspective on the matter, I should hasten to add that this sort of task is made a lot easier by having written a number of published papers over the time leading up to the writing. Each of those can end up being the bulk of a chapter, fleshed out to various extents by additional discussion or computations that would have been too lengthy (or not thought of at the time) to make it into the original paper. The really hard task was thinking of the story I wanted to tell that would connect those papers into a narrative, and writing the glorious introductory chapter that would introduce all the basic stuff I needed and motivate what was to follow, together with a thoughtful, honest, and maybe uplifting summary/concluding chapter.
I learned more about my subject’s specialty during that period when I was writing my thesis than at any other time during my study toward my PhD. I wanted to make it a document that someone would find useful, you see, and not just a bunch of papers glued together. I wanted to understand how what I was doing really fit into the big picture of what the research community was up to, and set it down coherently once and for all, in a way that I could understand, and perhaps look back on to remind me what I was doing, years hence. I think I succeeded. It is not a great thesis, of course, but a piece of work that I am still happy to pick off the shelf from time to time and look at. I don’t expect that anyone else will ever read it, and that’s perfectly fine with me.
The work (the essence of which was to be found in the published papers anyway) was, to my mind, somewhat important to communicate well. The rest of the field had missed several key points, had declared the matter over and done with, and had moved on. I wanted them to know otherwise, but this was hard, coming from a place none of the giants cared about. (This was around the end of the first wave of excitement about a breakthough in non-perturbative string theory. It had been decided that the non-perturbative models were sick, and the whole issue was dead. My work with my advisor Tim Morris and another student Simon Dalley showed that this was far from the case. There were other models that were perturbatively similar, and non-perturbatively fine and wonderful. Nobody really listened and it took over a decade to get it all properly understood by the wider community. I’ve told the story in part elsewhere, and the physics is quite beautiful. See here, and here.)
If you’re writing a thesis I wish you well and hope that circumstances conspire to allow you to enjoy it, since you’ll likely only do it once, and it can be a great experience. For me that writing period was a wonderful time, spent mostly in isolation during long warm Summer days in Southampton, scribbling and typing in my room during the day, going out occasionally to find papers, books, and other things in the library, and bring them (or photocopies) back to my lair to be dissected and assimilated. It was largely a solitary business, with long stretches of deliciously intense concentration, but interspersed with nuggets of human interaction – maybe just the odd trip to the pub, or maybe to a dark dance club on one of those Saturday nights (is the “West Indian club” still there I wonder…), or to a movie put on by the amazing university film society. Also, once a week I went off to Romsey to do the private mathematics tutoring I did in order to make some extra pocket money, but if the truth be told, mostly to see the tutee, with whom (unknown to her or anyone else) I was secretly and thoroughly in love…
Ah, slow, long Summers.
Good Times.
-cvj
I’m a graduate student working on my thesis and since the semester ended I have been able to get down to some serious work. I don’t mind (but don’t enjoy) the work, but tonight I had quite a shock when I found a report that essentially answers what my thesis is supposed to. Amazingly, it was a professionally done piece sponsored by the same company sponsoring me! I’m not quite sure what to make of this yet. What do you think?
the part about the tutee was very touching….
Sorry, no such declarations were made. Would not have been appropriate, anyway…
-cvj
I want to know what happened with the beautiful tutee. Did you ever go back, proudly bearing the finished thesis, and declare your affections to her?
Nigel,
It might interest you know that in the Netherlands, a doctoral thesis
always consists of a series of published papers. In Australia where I am in, universities are beginning to move in this direction too because more published papers raises the university’s research profile which makes it easier to get federal funding.
Clifford and David,
Thanks for clarifying this, and I can see that an examiner would find it encouraging that somebody else, such as a peer reviewer, has already approved a portion of the research. Publishing research as a series of papers does sound like a very good idea.
Isn’t it a worry whether somebody can be found who has the interest to peer-review the papers, and how a research dissertation would be treated by the assessment committee and external examiner if it was way-off mainstream ideas? I suppose that it might be easier to get serious papers sent for peer-review by a journal after being accepted as a research student somewhere prestigious. Affiliation to a respected research department would help, but such places are flooded with student applications. In any case, there’s a story that de Broglie’s PhD dissertation which discovered wave-particle duality was initially rejected until a famous physicist endorsed it. Hence research is risky to a career (several years to explain on a CV, if the PhD is not awarded), even when it is fruitful in a purely scientific sense. Einstein apparently managed to do a PhD when working full-time as a patent examiner. He was a genius, however.
Yes. But only in fewer than two dimensions. Less rather than fewer, actually, since it was in dimensions between one and two. Discuss.
-cvj
“…in my room at the top of the stairs at the back of the little house on Burgess Road (Southampton) that had the lovely and productive apple tree. After that intense time, I emerged with a complete thesis.”
So Clifford, did your thesis discuss gravity ?
Nigel,
You misunderstood what I wrote. As Clifford wrote (thank you Clifford), an examiner reviewing a thesis that included one or more published papers from a refereed journal, would find it encouraging that at least one other colleague thinks the research has merit. This may have some importance when the examiner is not an expert in all aspects of the thesis. For example, someone who is familiar with the subject, but not with a specific experimental technique. In an area where the number of researchers could be under a few hundred, it can be hard at a given moment to find someone to be an examiner who is expert in both. This was the case with my student. The examiner only agreed to review the thesis when I told him that the 20% he was not expert on was was already published in a prestigious journal.
Hi Nigel,
I’m sure David can answer for himself, but I must say that I don’t know how you got from:
“… it becomes a lot harder for an external examiner to criticize a thesis if the work has been published in a refereed journal.” – David
to
“Do you suggest that the external examiner doesn’t make much effort to be objective, unless the research has been published first?” -Nigel
I don’t see how the one comes even close to implying the other. For a start, a piece of work being unpublished does not necessarily translate into it being unpublishable. There could be a host of reasons why a piece of work may have been not published, such as it simply having not been submitted for publication yet. I think David meant that if it is published, it is encouraging and suggests that others have looked at it (and does not imply that he/she will not still give it the scrutiny it deserves), but that is not the same as saying that if it has *not* been published then that is a bad sign.
Now if an external examiner had to consider a thesis of *known* rejected research along with the referee reports that resulted in the rejection…. *that* would be an interesting state of affairs!
Cheers,
-cvj
(Sorry for my error above: absence, not absense. Can spell when reading, but not when writing.)
Very interesting, particularly since the PhD is the essential entry level qualification for professional scientists.
“… it becomes a lot harder for an external examiner to criticize a thesis if the work has been published in a refereed journal.” – David
Do you suggest that the external examiner doesn’t make much effort to be objective, unless the research has been published first? If so, everything is down to peer reviewers, who don’t really exist if the research is truly original (where you have no expert “peer reviewers”. Are the external examiners paid properly to do their job, or do they work practically for free? The absense of payment to peer reviewers doesn’t help to encourage objective assessments or constructive criticisms, and some papers are not even read and checked properly when being rejected for being non-mainstream.
Midway through my undergrad thesis, I found myself discussing a trade-off between different approaches, and so I slipped in (with proper attribution) a joke I had heard from Jeffrey Goldstone. “Theorem Zero: You can’t win.” My advisor noticed it, but nobody else has said a word. . . .
Hello Clifford,
Odd reading this on the very day my doctoral student just gave the graduate school office the final draft of his thesis. Agree that publishing papers while a student is good for a number of reasons, not just job wise. For a start, it becomes a lot harder for an external examiner to criticize a thesis if the work has been published in a refereed journal.
Sounds fun. I confess one of the reasons I look forward to graduate school is the thought of getting to do a pretty thesis, though I don’t mention this too loud since I’ve yet to see a favorable reaction to such a notion.
And while it’s nowhere near as intense, I did have a good time writing my undergrad thesis (finishing just over a month ago), mainly at my favorite coffeeshop because I like to pretend I’m a Bohemian sometimes. Around page 17 I added in the line “is anyone still reading this?” into the text just to see if I could get a reaction, and alas haven’t yet. 😉