How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Working with Your Supervisor
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These kinds of distraction may be the explanation for a problem that I’ve seen
with a good number of PhD students: a tendency to completely stop work when they
hit an obstacle, even when it is trivial. These students will happily work hard at their
research, meet weekly with their supervisor and so on, but every now and again will
come to a meeting and literally have done nothing for a week. When the student
and I explore it, the explanation is that something ‘didn’t work’ or ‘didn’t make
sense’; and for some reason they haven’t found something else to do, or found a
new way to attack the problem. Worse, while freezing up once would be explicable,
such students tend to do so repeatedly, sometimes in several consecutive weeks.
In some cases it might be a loss of confidence, but a common factor does seem to
be the extent to which the student has a rich life outside study. There is an obvious
lesson, about making sure that you are working effectively and so on, but another
lesson is that, ultimately, responsibility lies with you and not your supervisor. Problems
with effectiveness can stem from anything from difficulties with the research
to a personal crisis to simple procrastination to an overload of hobbies and social
commitments, and even an engaged supervisor won’t know what is going on if you
conceal the cause of your difficulties.
Working with Your Supervisor
The process of undertaking a PhD completes a transition from being an undergraduate
to being a researcher, a transition that may have started with a minor thesis or
some other introduction to research. As an undergraduate, a primary role of the academics
you interact with is to assess your skills and award marks. As a researcher,
these same academics work with you to share in discovery and the creation of new
work. At the start of your PhD, your relationship may be very much that of master
and apprentice; in the best cases, by the end it is a meeting of peers.
An exception to this, however, is the write-up process, where your supervisor
can guide you but the thesis is the responsibility of the student—the supervisor is
not an author, and must arrange examination and so on. Write-up can thus be quite
different from earlier student–supervisor interactions such as paper writing that are
more of a partnership, a fact that some students struggle to adapt to. During writeup,
you also need to be sure to make the most of your supervisor’s experience as a
reader and referee, and be aware of when these skills are limited; if your supervisor
isn’t good at grammar correction, for example, you need to seek that skill elsewhere.
I’ve noticed several styles of relationship with my students. In some cases, we
work together on problems as peers and bringing different skills to the research.
But this isn’t the right relationship for all students or for all research environments;
in some cases, our relationship is one of advisor (me) and explorer (student), such
as when the work involves a larger step into the unknown. And some students appreciate
a supervisor who directs, that is, takes close responsibility for the work and
gives a firm structure of activities to work within. This isn’t a good working mode