The best way to write a PhD thesis is to not write one.<p>Instead, spend your time writing articles and getting them into journals. You should be able to produce roughly one published article a year [0]. When you have 3-4 published or near published articles, take them and put them together into a dissertation.<p>Most universities will allow this and it's the approach to developing a dissertation that minimizes your risk (you don't bet everything on one experiment, you minimize the risk of last minute critiques and requests for changes, etc...).<p>[0] This might seem intimidating when you start out, but if you want a promising future in academia you will eventually need to be producing 5, 10 or more articles a year (with admittedly a lot of collaboration and assistance from other). Setting a strict goal of one article a year as a grad student should be obtainable in most fields and get you on the right track. It will also force you to be disciplined and to produce. When of the biggest risk for grad students is trying to be too perfect or too "big" in their work.
This isn't a bad list, but it's hard to over-emphasize the amount of pushing that supervisors and committee members typically need to clarify their beliefs about what is an acceptable dissertation. It's not too strong to say that most academics will flat-out lie to students about what they need do. Although this "lying" is frequently the result of inattention of misunderstanding its effects are indistinguishable from malice.<p>So don't be shy about getting very concrete and specific with your committee, including the kind of analysis you want to do, the theoretical framework you want to apply, etc. This is all easier in the sciences--humanities PhD programs are basically abuse factories (<a href="http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588)--but" rel="nofollow">http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588)--but</a> even in the sciences it is all too common to see students get misled by their supervisor and/or committee, who give guidance in one direction one month and a completely different direction the next.<p>One further piece of advice with regard to a clear thesis question: I've often found it useful to ask students "What's the title of your dissertation?" This just a more concrete way of asking about their thesis question, but it's much harder to fool yourself about. "Well, I"m investigating blah blah blah..." may look like an answer to the question "What's your thesis question?" but it frequently can't be reduced to "Experimental Investigation of Blah Using Blah Models and Blah Theories".<p>Finally, it isn't just your own perfectionism you have to watch out for. My iron rule for when a dissertation is finished is: the very first time your advisor tells you to change A to B in draft N, and then tells you to change B back to A in draft M &gt; N, you are done. Your resistance to making further changes should go up factorially at that point, because your advisor has stopped paying attention or has become obsessed with minutia, and if given a free rein will continue to fiddle around indefinitely. I've seen students waste a year on this kind of nonsense, when they had a perfectly acceptable dissertation to begin with.
If you can get past the broken modal dialog (I had to use Reader view in Safari), and the inane image macros, and the listicle-style writing, this post is crammed with <i>excellent</i> advice for science PhD candidates in their 3rd year or beyond (much of it is applicable to postdocs as well).<p>Discusses how to define a clear scientific question and maintain focus on it in the face of (sometimes subtle) forces that make both of these things difficult.
2. Is bullshit. Stapler thesis are totally acceptable. In fact many people think they are better than a traditional thesis since they are based on work that is of enough quality to already have been published in other venues.
Something nobody mentions is the idea of meeting with your committee on a regular basis during your dissertation research. In theory, this is supposed to be happening, and the committee should be keeping an eye on your progress as a sort of check and balance. But because it doesn't occur regularly, it falls on the student's shoulders to call such a meeting, and they might be too timid to do it, especially if they are having problems.<p>Instead, the first time your committee knows that you exist is when you plop your dissertation on their desk a few weeks before your defense. And they say, "what the hell is this?"<p>Perhaps if it were "forced" to occur regularly, it would be harder for students to spiral into the black hole. I think that the committee should actually be serving in a supervisory role.
I'm already getting dragged in atleast one of these directions and I'm less than 2 months into my PhD. As mine is partially CASE studentship sponsored (industry partner provides additional funding). I have the company requesting me attend meetings a few hours down the country and requesting I complete small jobs beneficial to the company, all barely related to my research. This travelling tends to lose me a couple of days alone and I can see it easily becoming worse if I don't get a handle on it soon.
I am shocked at how all the focus in the article and in this thread are about getting the degree with little regards for doing good science.<p>Pushing yourself to publish every year creates noise in the scientific literature and often leads to data cherry picking and massaging which is not just "questionable" as the article claims but completely invalidates everything a researcher does and makes him or her a fraud. The fact that it is tolerated makes it really hard to trust the research coming out of universities nowadays.
The premise is, honestly, not very good. Like with a movie, there are infinitely many ways to do it wrong. Listing them is futile. Better to cut down to what you should do (this would be a much smaller article).
I can't imagine doing this for 8 years, even though I love science, and I'm a published scientist. Even conservatively it would cost me 1.5-2 million dollars of opportunity cost to do that.<p>If you're doing this for science, then don't complain. If you want a career, there are better options than slaving for 8 years, 80 hours a week.
The phd needs to be extinct. I have one and lined up a tenure track job at a premier university and even I know the whole enterprise is doomed. Looking for other opportunities STAT.