Through the course of the last 6-12 months of writing-up, my impending collision course towards Thesis Zero has highlighted a number of key things that every grad student should keep in mind before officially handing in your work for appraisal, and which has led to generation of the official PhD Fraud Submission Checklist.

The list aims to run through those things that one might forget in the heat of the moment or in the mad rush between finishing your final sentence and celebrating with copious amounts of alcohol. The PhDFPSC, therefore, is here to help guide you through the finalising and formatting process, in case the dizziness of finally getting to the end is too much and you lose all focus on space and time. It’s primarily a list for my own use, but hopefully it’s relevant for everyone who’s in the final throes of putting together their own weighty tomes, and wants to make sure they don’t forget anything crucial.

The PhD Fraud Pre-Submission Checklist

• Check the submission guidelines of your institution. For reference, mine can be found [here]. You don’t want to get it wrong; in the worst case, you might have to completely re-submit everything again. If you’re going to spend time formatting and tidying up your completed thesis, you may as well get it right first time, yeah?
• Check all spelling and grammar and everything in the document. If possible, get someone else to read it (or at least scan an eye over it) since Microsoft spellchecker is about as trustworthy as a van parked outside a school with a hand-painted sign saying “Free Candy”.
• Make sure that you haven’t accidentally left in all those footnotes and comments bad-mouthing your supervisor/examiner, calling him “a fop-haired imbecile”.
• Check that all figures, tables, equations, etc. are numbered correctly and referenced properly in the text and in the contents pages. The last thing that an examiner wants to do is to be flicking backward and forward through 100+ pages and not being able to find that diagram of Honey Badger mating rituals that you’re referring to in the text.
  

  A conservative estimate of a thesis examiner’s fury.

• Also, make sure that your references section or bibliography is up-to-date and contains all the relevant information. If possible, make sure you referenced journal/conference articles that your examiner has written, such that he gets a warm fuzzy glow of being important and powerful.
• Further to the above, if you have referenced your thesis examiner, then do make sure you’ve spelt his/her name right and their co-authors: believe me, they’ll notice. Also, try not to reference their work in the context of criticising it or saying that it is “total bullshit”; things like that will tend to get you a bad rep, and are unlikely to contribute to a super-happy-fun time in your viva voce.
• Check that you haven’t accidentally ‘lost’ a whole chapter, or accidentally pressed ‘CTRL+A’, ‘DEL’ by accident and wiped your enter thesis. It’s easier done that you’d think (as I can attest from experience).
• Did I already mention that you should back up your files and documents properly? You should back up your files and documents properly. For something as important as The Thesis, I tend to at least carry two hard copies and three soft copies on my person at all time. Paranoid? Me?
• Make sure all your fonts and formatting is nice and consistent. If you have used anything except Times New Roman, Garamond, Calibri or something like that, change it.
• Be subtle about plagiarising: at least re-phrase some of the stuff you’ve inevitably copy-pasted from someone else’s work; or if you can think of a way of writing it that’s completely different (but essentially the same), all the better.
• Have you sorted out a Table of Contents, and listing of all the Figures, Tables, etc. you’ve used? Make sure they’re nicely up-to-date and don’t refer to a previous draft or point to the wrong page numbers.
• While we’re at it, how’s your Bibliography looking? It’s not the quantity of references that matters, it’s the quality: an examiner will likely notice if you’ve tried to artificially pad out your Bibliography with things you haven’t read. On the flip side, if you’d like to have fun with your examiner, include a completely made-up reference, just to check whether he/she is properly paying attention:
  

  Brown, E. L., & McFly, M. S. (1985). Unsteady State Analysis of Flux Capacitor Self-Excited Time Manipulation. Journal of Time Travel, 9 (9), 992–1000.

• Make sure you make all your graphs, figures and tables look really nice. Also: make sure that they’re decent resolution with a good DPI so that they look good even when they’re zoomed-in on a PDF. Go mad, use Adobe CS6 if you need to, but just take some care in how you’re presenting your results; if you can make it look visually appealing and interesting as well as merely presented the data, then it helps the examiner to read your work and engage with it.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1440

• Do you need to submit programming code as an appendix or on a data CD? You’d best go through your code with a fine tooth-comb, removing all those comments like “// THIS SECTION OF CODE DOESN’T WORK”, “%FUCKING MATLAB”, etc.
• Fill out your ‘Acknowledgements’ page properly; don’t skimp on the thanks for those who deserve it. This may be your only opportunity to do anything like an hour-long Oscar winner’s speech, so feel free to thank all the names under the Sun. Heck, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back as well; you certainly deserve it.
• Best take out that experimental slashfic chapter you wrote about your supervisor/Voldemort in a coffee-fuelled all-nighter haze way back in second year.
• Have you actually finished everything? There’s nothing important you’ve forgotten, is there? Just spend a few days thinking about it before you print and soft-bind it; you never know, you might finally remember that crucial figure you meant to put in but never got ‘round to that is totally the whole basis of your argument.
• Remember to actually submit the damned thing – in the joyous celebration and raucous parting upon finishing 3-4 years of work, it’s probably a good idea to not forget to hand it in.
• FINAL STEP: Party. Then have a massive panic attack because you just remembered that other key thing you forgot to put in and your thesis is already winging its way to your examiners. Oh well, never mind; there’s always time during “minor/major/entire corrections” (delete as applicable) to fix anything.

[Zinar7]

On the 1st of October, 2013, I officially entered my FIFTH year of PhD studies, and technically my NINTH year of University as whole. What once seemed like a carefree jaunt into the unknown to study the engineering of aircraft and spacecraft has almost turned into a proper career, and I’ve survived eight whole years of MEng thru MPhil/PhD study to be where I am today.

Very soon, I will be finally giving man-birth to my own weighty tome, polishing off the rough edges of The Thesis and  finally palming the damned thing off on someone else. I’ve been working on my thesis document for the best part of twelve months now (although I had been writing less formally for it before that) while part-time working on my PhD research and working on other research the rest of the time. As we speak, I’m still firmly entangled in the throes of writing The Thesis, but things are finally starting to coalesce into something concrete: I still feel like I’m a long, long way off from having something that I’m happy with (and heck, there’s no guarantee that I’d ever get there in a million years anyway), but I’ve got to hand something solid in within the next couple of months, so my nose is very firmly pressed to the grindstone.

I should probably be writing this instead of penning blog entries. Oh well.

About the same time that I’ll hand in The Thesis, I’m also due to finish work on the couple of post-doc projects that have helped support my through this final year of writing-up (technically I’m a ‘post-doctoral research assistant’, but I kind of still haven’t gotten the ‘doctor’ bit yet so I feel kind of bad telling people I’m a post-doc. Doesn’t stop me, though). Since October last year, I’ve worked full(ish)-time on two EU-funded projects on space debris (the ACCORD and ReVuS projects) whilst trying to fit my PhD work and writing of crying about The Thesis into the time surrounding that. Where my PhD stuff has focussed on looking at the ocean from space by using imaging radar on spacecraft, my primary research now revolves around understanding the risks of space debris to those same satellites, and figuring out how satellite manufacturers and operators can be encouraged to comply with international guidelines that are in place to avoid a considerable rise in space debris population and hence risk to orbital satellites. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be attending a space debris conference at ESA Harwell, meanwhile back in July we exhibited at the UK Space Conference (and here you can find my review/summary of our time there): at both events, I spoke (or will talk) about my work on the ACCORD project and our progress so far in quantifying the effects of mitigation on the debris environment and communicating this to space industry. There’s been quite a good reaction from both industry and the space debris community about our work, and the result is a new ‘environmental impact rating’ for spacecraft based on their consequences for the space debris environment.

Unlike writing The Thesis, I really enjoy some of the space debris work I’m involved in, and it’s far, far more interesting than any of my PhD work has been. It’s certainly been an entertaining distraction from the misery of The Thesis, and I’ve been getting paid for doing it as well as been on a few nice trips abroad, so I guess that should be considered a Victory. It’s often quite a surprise to find myself genuinely engaged and passionate about research again: it’s definitely a good feeling to be ‘fired up’ about science and engineering, given that my PhD has long since descended into an uninspiring trudge. Sometimes, that spare enthusiasm spills over into my Thesis, and I actually get something done for a change, which can only be a good thing. The Thesis (v2.something) is almost ready to have the final few chapters sent to my supervisor for final comments, and it’s almost looking like a ‘proper’ piece of work now. Almost.

Sounds about right.
(Calvin & Hobbes, 31st October 1989)

I mean, “writing up”: how hard can it be? You just string a few words and sentences together, add a few graphs and diagrams that support your argument and reference all the important literature such that you have a cohesive combination of introduction, argument and discussion with which to defend your novel contribution to the research field. Piece o’ cake, right?

To some, writing comes naturally; to others, it’s more of a struggle. I actually consider myself to be a fairly good writer (although I can descend into ‘waffle’ like a pro), but it’s more through practice and perseverance than any natural talent; my usual technique to just keep spouting words onto a page and then, over a lengthy series of drafts and re-drafts, whittle that down to some pro content. I like to call this the ‘Keep Chucking Words at the Page and Eventually Some of them Might Not be Terrible’ technique. It seems to work, though, and I’ve ascended (somewhat reluctantly) to being the default writer-upper-person in our little group of grad students; enough such that I’ve rather ominously been given the nickname of a certain 18th-Century poet who dabbled in daffodils, among other things. My four-year jaunt into academic/scientific research has at least taught me a few of the tricks of scientific writing; I recently came across this chart from RecycleXP, which humourously recounts some of the prominent tropes in academic writing, and inspired both amusement at how ‘true’ it is but also quite a bit of cringing regarding how much I’ve used each one in The Thesis:

http://www.recyclexp.net/2012/01/what-it-means-when-it-says.html

In many ways, the worst part about writing a major document is the people around you. People ask questions like: “So how much of your thesis have you written?” and “When are you going to hand in?” and “Why does your face look weird?”, which are rarely helpful and to which I usually respond with: “Argh! I don’t know! Soon? Maybe?” <*crying*>

As with all research, it’s possible to keep finding more things you’d like to do, and there’s always more data to look at and more stuff to write. I could probably keep looking at The Thesis until the end of forever and find things I’m not happy with, but I guess at some point everyone kind of has to take the plunge and submit the damned thing regardless of how close/far away it is to perfection. For me, that point appears to be approaching at increasing speed, and I’m desperately trying to tie up loose ends and polish off the ‘rougher’ bits of it and plug the most ‘obvious’ gaps in my argument. At some point though, you just have to find a place to put down your pen/typewriter/word processor <delete as applicable> and stop writing.

With that, I shall take my own advice and board the train back to Thesis-land, where I’m informed that we will be stopping at Boredom, Misery and Confusion along the way. All aboard the failroad!

[Zinar7]