26 I’m chugging along on my thesis, now about half done, but this is a fraction that I have been at for about 3 weeks. Half. The first half few by as I was converting my previously published papers into TeX and adding figures and whatnot – to be honest, it wasn’t that bad – but now I’m rather over it. I have gotten myself about 78 pages into the material and I’m suddenly wondering more and more what I can get away with as opposed to how well I should compile this thing.
I think, back in the olden days, the thesis was a writ of accomplishments of projects that were largely unfinished and unpublished or were out at the ye olde printing press and you were writing something that was a summation of 4 years of measuring melting points of salts. Today I hardly see the point of a thesis other than a protracted book report of everything you have actually done over the last 5 years. I will have no speculative results, open questions or unanswered mysteries in my thesis. There’s little to no room for intellectual waxing and didactic points are, you know (if they were even read) probably frowned upon. The mission is to write the most vanilla document stuffed with as much shit as you possibly can before the format check deadline.
So, should I stress over the articulate beauty of this document or should I cobble it together? I mean, not to sound lazy, but how much can I get away with? I don’t really want to short change anything but I have a very small amount of time to write, you know, scientific papers for journals that will be read and are important and will make a difference. Do you people think I could get away with writing it in the same careless abandon that I write my blog in? The most my thesis can aspire to is a “customized bookend” and I’m probably too cheap to pay for binding.
And what the best TeX editor for windows?
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You might be missing the biggest point of them all…who cares? I’m at a smaller university, slowly cranking through my dissertation and on a daily basis I keep asking myself if anyone’s even going to actually read what I wrote (committee included). I’d be willing to bet that an overwhelming majority of my “readers” will only scan the acknowledgements section to see if they’ve been included.
I’m tempted to drop in a few random pages of a stream-of-conscience monologue into the text.
The worst is the paper. Each committee member gets a copy (for edits). Then the grad school, the university and the library all get copies on cotton paper.
P.S. Are you required to submit spectra? This is becoming a significant waste of paper.
Yes. 1H and 13C of each novel compound. Lots of dead trees.
You should ask your boss if that is ‘really’ necessary, or if a journal-style description will do. It’s not like it’s some unbendable rule. I did, and I managed to save a lot of pages. I still had about 20 pages of spectra, but then some people wanted a description on the spectrum of where each peak was with respect to the molecule (which was more than what JCAS wants and it seemed unreasonable to me even though I said the exact opposite out loud at the time), so I just deleted them all on the next iteration. No one cared.
Ahh…thesis writing. I still salute you person who made the CU Thesis class. It was buggy and old, yeah, but it helped!
Your uni still requires paper copies? I was required to pay *more* if I wanted to do that, I think. In fact, I don’t think CU even stocks theses in the library anymore. Rather, the catalog just has a link to the electronic version. The only copies I had to make were for my committee.
Oh, and don’t assume no one will read all of it. There is always someone who does. I know I had one…two, actually.
As for LaTeX editor on Windows, the best by far in my opinion is WinEdt. It’s shareware, but worth the cost to register. The setup can be fun, but once it’s running, it is amazing.
Every Windows user in my lab uses WinEdt – it’s very good. However, I recommend rejecting Windows
What I care about is the experimental and the spectra. In thirty years (or some other random time) when somebody wants to make one of your compounds, that’s all they care about. After all, when you prepared literature compounds as precursors, isn’t that all you cared about?
Tex
Very true of course. But some of the procedures that I was using repeatedly every year or so were so good, that after a while, I surfed the internet (in my free time of course) to find out the fate of the authors on those papers from 20-30 years ago. After all, my success rested on their procedure since that’s where I got my precursor from. I just wanted to know if their academic career was still moving along, or if they got that big job at a company and got married and had kids or whatnot.
Well… it’s a very cruel world out there. At least for the chemists responsible for first synthesizing my precursor. I mean… dear god that’s rough.
P.S. I think a spectrum text description is sufficient though.
Oh, believe you me I asked. He seemed to indicate that was one of the most important parts of the thesis.
Unfortnately, we have had several occasions where there are errors in the numerical listing, where access to the original spectrum would have been vary helpful. Although I would note that it has generally been in the comparison of synthetic versus natural products.
Tex
My PhD advisor made me write a very elaborate, cohesive thesis – I think it was a big waste of time. You should just staple your papers together as your thesis, submit it, pick up your PhD certificate and get out of there. Speaking of papers, you wrote a while back about finishing your thesis with 6-10 papers. How did you do with that goal?
On track to get 6 1st author and 3 ‘other’ author papers plus a book chapter. I should also be on papers for at least a year after I leave the lab, so I’m actually going to move my projection up to 10-12 papers from graduate school.
Amazingly, despite being an onerous fuck, my boss conceded the other day that I’m at least in his “top 3″ students of all time. Not bad language from a chaired prof.
Your boss is onerous? Odious or ornery, I would think. Hm..
The best TeX editor for windows is Linux. Kile’s pretty phat, and TeXmaker (which works in ‘dows) looks like it has a very similar feel, but I cannot vouch for its stability. For the longest time I used to just use good old nano.
I am beginning to write up, and I am on the cusp of two options. Go the Finchsigmate route and ‘tex up my two papers, and slap on an introduction, or just hand it the text over to a library sciences master’s student and have them take care of all the asinine formatting and citation rules. This is what a previous grad student did, and he said not having to sweat it out made life easy? Why worry about that stuff when the thesis has devolved into a piece of shit anyways?
The third thing I was thinking about doing is just going nuts and writing something that is totally crazy – a well-structured, literary account of what I’ve done (at the same time as compiling a standard thesis) and submitting both. But I have two months to do this so I’m thinking that’s not going to happen.
One of the dangers of no one reading a thesis is someone else coming along a few years later and reading it and seriously doing some WTFing. One particular one I downloaded off our electronic thesis suppository had a prologue that rambled on like a Charles Dickins novel, giving a verbose account of his spiritual journey through chemistry.
Seriously – SPIRITUAL journey, as in the exuberance and pain of the soul, as told from a new aged Pagan perspective.
Hey it could be worse, he could have written it like a Danishevsky paper!
Oh snap!
Seriously, I was wondering what I hated about Danishevsky’s work, until I went and visited my ex-navy (currently war protester) friend in LA, he suggested I read the Ulysses S Grant Memoirs; he said Grant wrote well; Grant used “verbs not adjectives”.
There ya go, folks. Verbs not adjectives.
Quite honestly, I tend to use nouns. But avoiding adjectives is good advice. They are often extraneous, overly flowery, and misused.
I think I prefer Danishefsky papers to Nicolaou papers, unless KCN breaks out the Cavafy poetry.
That’s great! Do you have a job lined up? Will you still blog in crazed fashion? The advantages, to my mind, of taking a paper-driven thesis-writing approach, is that your papers come out sooner and you probably have more papers as you will have been directing your efforts toward doing publishable research. This is why I am so negative on the ‘writing a beautiful thesis approach’ – my papers are still being published from my thesis, 3 years later!
I have a post-doc lined up in a very good lab. I will not, however, be blogging here. I’ll talk to a few people, see if I can’t get hooked up in a larger consortium of science bloggers, maybe. I wonder if Wired is looking for a blogger…
With all those accolades, gotta wonder what it is kyle keeps bitching about. I don’t know either.
There is a saying by Voltaire:
The best is the enemy of good.
9 papers is ridiculous. I’ve only manage 8 so far in grad school. Must work harder…
Just slap some crap together like NJ says. Our professor didn’t even read the thesis from the Golden Boy from our lab when he graduated. I doubt he’d take the time to read anything from the rest of us.
It all depends on your advisor, and his or her mood at the time. Mine wanted a beautifully crafted and coherent work of art, where I discuss future avenues of research and all that jazz.
I am still slightly bitter about the entire experience.
Very few people will ever read your thesis after you defend and graduate – so don’t torture yourself over its stylistic beauty. You should avoid things that can potentially annoy people in your defense committee (so if you know that someone is pedantic about his favored peculiar form of drawing the structures or the citation format make sure you get it the way he likes it) but being too bland is lesser sin than being pompous and verbose.
People on the defense committee will probably read several thesis manuscripts in a short period of time, and they will likely read yours only once, maybe even flipping through it. Make sure to provide a good summary at the beginning and end of thesis, a clear table of contents, that the intro parts are well referenced but short and to the point. When you discuss speculative ideas, such as transition state, clearly say that these thoughts are “proposed” and put them into a separate chapter/paragraph.
As always, understatement is better than overstatement – nothing is more annoying than self-confident brat that makes everybody know how tremendous his breakthrough results are, especially when it is true.
Agreed on the spectra bit. A picture is worth a thousand words (or in this case a thousand “3.53ppm, 2H, t, J=8Hz”)