What’s the Point of a Thesis?

 

Merlin Crossley, Lab Head

 

What’s the Point of a Thesis?

 

Completing a thesis is one of the big hurdles that research students must jump over. In changing times it is worth asking whether theses are still relevant.

I think they are but recognize they have advantages and disadvantages and my advice is – keep it short.

 

Advantages

The very process of preparing a thesis is a training in organisation, presentation, writing, and production. It is a chance to integrate your knowledge and to engage with your supervisor and collaborators while focussing minutely on your own project.

Beyond that, actually producing something that is essentially your first published book is, and should be, satisfying. It should give you confidence. If you can do that, you can attempt anything.

The thesis also becomes a recipe book for new lab members. Reading theses is a better introduction to a lab than attempting to identify the most relevant papers from the primary literature. Theses can also contain information on dead ends, the sort of things that are not usually published.

Theses make up a chronicle of a lab. In our department in the Rountree seminar room, we have walls of bound theses and it is great when a past student returns as a successful senior scientist and identifies their thesis on the shelf. Francis Stewart from EMBL and now Dresden did that recently!

 

Disadvantages

Thesis production takes a long time. It can become an end in itself. It can distract students from pushing their own research ahead.

Theses are too long to be read by many people, they repeat a lot of work that is published and contain work that is unpublishable (sometimes for good reason).

They are overly formal and constrained to a particular format – Acknowledgements, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and Future Directions, References.

My recommendation is therefore to keep theses as short as possible. This works well if a project has been successful and both the student and examiners are usually delighted that the thesis is short.

Where the project has been a challenge and has met with several dead ends then it is harder to produce a short and compelling thesis. Students may not be confident that they have enough positive results to merit the award of a doctorate and may try to pad the work out with demonstrations of all the good ideas that failed.

I can understand why this happens but it helps no one and experienced examiners do appreciate that the thesis is a summary of the best outcomes during the candidature. Examiners don’t expect miracles.

 

Alternatives

There are some alternatives to conventional theses these days. Some supervisors encourage their students to produce a ‘thesis by publication’ where students bind up their published work and put it in context with an introduction and a discussion chapter.

I’ve assessed such theses and found them very hard to digest. The raw papers are sometimes difficult to understand without more context and as published works they have already been honed via the peer review system. Moreover, the contributions by multiple authors means it is hard to see what special contribution the student has made.

 

Should you worry about your thesis?

There are lots of things to worry about in science. It is increasingly competitive, funds are scarce, and exploring the unknown means one goes up a lot of blind alleys, some of which are soul destroying! One can also be scooped or one can be plain wrong about a big theory. One should worry about being successful in this extremely challenging environment.

But don’t worry too much about your thesis. My experience is that all students who consistently apply themselves to their work in a good lab will be rewarded by a PhD. It is not that everyone passes automatically but that the system allows students to self-select.

If you are good enough to get into a good lab and good enough to stay the distance, handling all the ups and downs along the way, and if you are supported by a good supervisor and department, then you will almost certainly get your thesis.

Thus most people who do make the distance and submit, are rewarded by a PhD. On the other hand not all those that begin end up hanging in there and submitting thesis. This is what ensures that graduating with a PhD is still special. Completing a thesis is a triumph that students should be proud of.