• Question: You said that you write in your PhD thesis, what do you have to write in it?&what is it#?

    Asked by kushy103 to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 22 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 22 Jun 2012:

      In general it has:
      Literature review
      Method
      Results
      Analysis
      Conclusions

      But it’s got to be a bit of a story. My first year was spent trawling through other peoples’ work trying to find out what had been done and how I could add to that (setting the scene). Then I set up some experimental work, and will describe that so that it can be done in the same way by anybody who reads the thesis (describing the action). The rest is about what I found from the experiments and what that means (tying it all together).

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 23 Jun 2012:

      When you study for aPhD, it’s not like a school or even a university course. You’re basically doing a piece of research to learn about something that no-one else has. You also learn (by making plenty of mistakes) how to design good experiments.
      The PhD thesis is a report that describes what people knew before you started (the literature review), what you did (method), what you found out (results), why it’s important (analysis) and then some conclusions.

    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      It take 3-months to write and then you have a 3 hour interview about it! Then you get to be called “Dr”.

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