Is the doctoral thesis obsolete? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#41

Post by mathattack » Fri, May 22, 2015, 12:16 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #21

sillypog wrote: post #16

The UK process is great if the student's goal is to gain a PhD. After approximately 3 years of running experiments, you present your hypotheses and gather together your results and try to make it look like these are related. If the goal is to have an academic career, this is not adequate. Graduating without having results that are good enough to publish in peer reviewed articles puts the UK student far behind others…

This is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year. When I was an academic my university put great pressure o…

It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation

Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for abusing students as cheap labor!

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#42

Post by Thriptic » Fri, May 22, 2015, 12:20 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #32

_delirium wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if anything we need better documentation of methods. This is something often overlooked with the open-scientific-data movement also: data on its own is not very useful (in the sense of being insufficient to draw valid conclusions) if you don't have good documentation of how precisely it was collected, which is critical to interpreting it correctly... otherwise you just have some numbers in a CSV file. Traditiona…

There is no need these days for brevity with methods since everything is online. Put it all into the SI and be done with it. One problem with many methods is the lack of description of the pitfalls and critical steps. When you go to repeat an experiment you often don't have exactly the same equipment or reagents as the original paper. Most of the time this does not matter, but in an annoying number of cases some part…

In my experience a lot of very critical steps in experiments are frequently never formally defined in literature or even within lab notebooks, existing only as institutional knowledge. What may seem like an obvious step not worth docimenting to the original investigators is non-obvious to people looking to repeat the work, leading to different results.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#43

Post by stellographer » Fri, May 22, 2015, 12:46 AM UTC

This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_.

I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower... and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the horrors of writing an introduction...

The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings, ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!).

Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares about... That's what being an academic is!

If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be pointless for you.

The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested (again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic" systems...

Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#44

Post by bsder » Fri, May 22, 2015, 1:04 AM UTC

This infuriates me:

"But Leigh argues that unlucky students with no results “shouldn’t be getting a PhD anyway”, since the degree is awarded “for a contribution to knowledge, not for a good try”."

Translation: never do work on anything that has even the possibility of failure.

Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge.

This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#45

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, May 22, 2015, 1:37 AM UTC

sampo wrote: post #38

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For CS? Not in your thesis, but maybe in a paper based on the thesis.

In natural sciences, thesis is based on papers. In CS, paper is based on thesis.

Both actually. Its just that your thesis won't get many if any non-self citations, even if it is really good. People will cite your paper, which they bother to take time reading (hopefully).

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#46

Post by nickm12 » Fri, May 22, 2015, 4:25 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #3

> He would much prefer to see theses’ introductory sections “written along the lines of a good review article, where the student does a critical appraisal of the state of the field”. Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are not original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to…

Agreed! Not every thesis is great, but most research isn't great either. Good students write good theses and I've found many with whole chapters on important topics that are just glossed over in the research papers.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#47

Post by danieltillett » Fri, May 22, 2015, 9:31 AM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #41

danieltillett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year. When I was an academic my university put great pressure o…

It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for abusing students as cheap labor!

Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the incompetent are getting pushed through.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#48

Post by danieltillett » Fri, May 22, 2015, 9:32 AM UTC

sillypog wrote: post #33

danieltillett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They vary by area because of the nature of research. It is much harder in the experimental sciences to "schedule" results. My PhD has both experimental (lab work) and computing aspects and all the computing research took within the expect time (+- 20%). The lab aspects were much more variable. I had one experiment which I expected would take 3 months to finalise that worked first time and I was finished by the aftern…

Yes, my experience was in the biological sciences, where bench work can have a very long amount of time between iterations. I'm always amazed that anyone working with mammals (eg evaluating transgenic mice) ever finishes their work. The issue is really the hard cut off that was mentioned above. Had I stayed on longer at that lab, I may have been able to get my results published, but there are many incentives to move…

This is true. The problem is that when you go looking for a post doc if you don't have any publications then you are thought to be incompetent.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#49

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, May 22, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #4

Reasons for thesis taking too long (and approximate time dealing with them): - Writer's block: couple of weeks - Dealing with braindead typeset standards, even with things like LateX libraries/helpers (some people still do it in Word): A couple of weeks to months - Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months - Nitpicking by advisor: some week…

Ah, you never had to deal with:

- Running and rerunning raw experiment (3 months)

- Running and rerunning statistical analyses (2 months)

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#50

Post by raverbashing » Fri, May 22, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #49

raverbashing wrote: post #4

Reasons for thesis taking too long (and approximate time dealing with them): - Writer's block: couple of weeks - Dealing with braindead typeset standards, even with things like LateX libraries/helpers (some people still do it in Word): A couple of weeks to months - Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months - Nitpicking by advisor: some week…

Ah, you never had to deal with: - Running and rerunning raw experiment (3 months) - Running and rerunning statistical analyses (2 months)

Sure this is an issue, but I was focusing more on the 'writing' aspects of the thesis, not getting the data (which, you are right, is a big problem as well)