(At UNSW, the Postgraduate Student Office will give you a thesis pack with various guide-lines and rules about thesis format. Make sure that you consult that for its formal requirements, as well as this rather informal guide.) Seventy-one UNSW PhD candidates have been awarded a Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses, Round 1 The Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses was introduced in to recognise high-quality PhD theses produced at UNSW. To receive this award, candidates must produce a thesis that requires only minimal corrections, receives outstanding and/or excellent levels of achievement for all examination criteria, and in the opinion of both examiners is in the top 10% of PhD theses The minimum requirement for admission to a PhD is: an appropriate UNSW Bachelor degree with upper second class Honours; or; a completed Masters by Research from UNSW with a substantial research component and demonstrated capacity for timely completion of a high quality research thesis; or
How to Write a Thesis Introduction | UNSW Australia
Spanish version: Cómo escribir una tesis de doctorado French version: Comment rediger une thèse Italian version: Come scrivere una tesi di dottorato. How do you make an outline of a chapter? For most of them, you might try the method that I use for writing papers, and which I learned from my thesis adviser Stjepan Marcelja : Assemble all the figures that you will use in it and put them in the order that you would use if you were going to explain to someone what they all meant.
You might as well rehearse explaining it to someone else — after all you will probably give several talks based on your thesis work. Once you have found the most logical order, note down the key words of your explanation.
These key words provide a skeleton for much of your chapter outline. Once you have an outline, discuss it with your adviser. Make a back-up of these files and do so every day at least depending on the reliability of your computer and the age of your memory. If you thesis file is not too large, unsw phd thesis, a simple way of making a remote back-up is to send it as an email attachment to a consenting email correspondent; you could also send it to unsw phd thesis. In either case, unsw phd thesis, be careful to dispose of superseded versions so that you don't waste disk space, especially if you have bitmap images or other large files.
Or you could use a drop-box or other more sophisticated system. You should also have a physical filing system: a collection of folders with chapter numbers on them. This will make you feel good about getting started and also help clean up your desk. Your files will contain not just the plots of results and pages of calculations, but all sorts of old notes, references, calibration curves, suppliers' addresses, specifications, speculations, notes from colleagues etc.
Stick them in that folder. Then put all the folders in a box or a filing cabinet. As you write bits and pieces of text, place the hard copy, the figures etc in these folders as well. Touch them and feel unsw phd thesis thickness from time to time — ah, the thesis is taking shape. If any of your data exist only on paper, unsw phd thesis, unsw phd thesis them and keep the copy in a different location. Consider making a copy of your lab book. This has another purpose beyond security: unsw phd thesis the lab book stays in the lab, but you may want a copy for your own future use.
Further, scientific ethics require you to keep lab books and original data for at least ten years, and a copy unsw phd thesis more likely to be found if two copies exist. If you haven't already done so, you should archive your electronic data, in an appropriate format.
Spreadsheet and word processor files are not suitable for long term storage. Archiving data by Joseph Slater is a good guide. While you are getting organised, unsw phd thesis, you should deal with any university paperwork.
Examiners have to be nominated and they have to agree to serve. Various forms are required by your department and by the university administration. Make sure that the rate limiting step is your production of the thesis, and not some minor bureaucratic problem. You may want to make your timetable into a chart with items that you can check off as you have finished them.
This is particularly useful towards the end of the thesis when you find there will be quite a few loose ends here and there. Your adviser will expect to read each chapter in draft form.
Do not be upset if a chapter — especially the first one you write — returns covered in red ink or its electronic equivalent. Scientific writing is a difficult art, and it takes a while to learn, unsw phd thesis. As a consequence, there will be many ways in which your first draft can be improved. So take a positive attitude to all the scribbles with which your adviser decorates your text: each comment tells you a way in which you can make your thesis better.
As you write your thesis, your scientific writing is almost certain to improve. Even for native speakers of English who write very well in other styles, one notices an enormous improvement in the first drafts from the first to the last chapter written. The process of writing the thesis is like a course in scientific writing, and in that sense each chapter is like an assignment in which you are taught, but not assessed.
Remember, only the final draft is assessed: the more comments your adviser adds to first or second draft, the better. If you have any characteristic grammatical failings, check for them.
Obviously your examiners will read the thesis. They will be experts in the general field of your thesis but, unsw phd thesis, on unsw phd thesis exact topic of your thesis, you are the world expert. Keep this in mind: you should write to make the topic clear to a reader who has not spent most of the last three years thinking about it.
Your thesis will also be used as a scientific report and consulted by future workers in your laboratory who will want to know, in detail, what you did. Theses are also consulted by people from other institutions, and the library at your university will store a copy as unsw phd thesis file on a server, unsw phd thesis.
The advantage is that your thesis can be consulted much more easily by researchers around the world, unsw phd thesis. See e. Australian digital thesis project for the digital availability of research theses. Write with these possibilities in mind, unsw phd thesis. It is often helpful unsw phd thesis have someone other than your adviser s read some sections of the thesis, particularly the introduction and conclusion chapters. It may also be appropriate to ask other members of staff to read some sections of the thesis which they may find relevant or of interest, as they may be able to make valuable contributions, unsw phd thesis.
In either case, only give them revised versions, so that they do not waste time correcting your grammar, spelling, poor construction or presentation. If you are writing in the passive voice, you must be more careful about attribution than if you are writing unsw phd thesis the active voice.
Short, simple phrases and words are often better than long ones. Some politicians use "at this point in time" instead of "now" precisely because it takes longer to convey the same meaning. They do not care about elegance or efficient communication.
You should. On the other hand, there will be times when you need a complicated sentence because the idea is complicated. If your primary statement requires several qualifications, each of these may need a subordinate clause: "When [qualification], and where [proviso], and if [condition] then [statement]", unsw phd thesis.
Some lengthy technical words will also be necessary in many theses, particularly in fields like biochemistry, unsw phd thesis. Do not sacrifice accuracy for the sake of brevity. An advertising copy writer would love it. The longer example would be fine in a physics thesis because English speaking physicists will not have trouble with the words. A physicist who did not know all of those words would probably be glad to remedy the lacuna either from the context or by consulting a dictionary.
Sometimes it is easier to unsw phd thesis information and arguments as a series of numbered points, rather than as one or more long and awkward paragraphs, unsw phd thesis.
A list of points is usually unsw phd thesis to write. You should be careful not to use this presentation too much: your thesis must be a connected, convincing argument, not just a list unsw phd thesis facts and observations.
One important stylistic choice is between the active voice and passive voice. The active voice "I measured the frequency The passive voice "The frequency was measured If you use the passive voice, be especially wary of dangling participles.
For example, the sentence "After considering all of these possible materials, plutonium was selected" implicitly attributes consciousness to plutonium. This choice is a question of taste: I prefer the active because it is clearer, more logical and makes attribution simple. The only arguments I have ever heard for avoiding the active voice in a thesis are i many theses are written in the passive voice, and ii some very polite people find the use of "I" immodest, unsw phd thesis.
Use the first person singular, not plural, when reporting work that you did yourself: the editorial 'we' may suggest that you had help beyond that listed in your acknowledgments, or it may suggest that you are trying to share any blame. On the other hand, unsw phd thesis, retain plural unsw phd thesis for "data": "data" is the plural of "datum", and lots of scientists like to preserve the distinction. Just say to yourself "one datum is. An excellent and widely used reference for English grammar and style is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.
In many cases, a reasonably neat diagram can be drawn by hand faster than with a graphics package, and you can scan it if you want an electronic version. Either is usually satisfactory, unsw phd thesis.
A one bit i. black and whitemoderate resolution scan of a hand-drawn sketch will be bigger than a line drawing generated on a graphics package, but not huge. While talking about the size of files, unsw phd thesis, we should mention that photographs look pretty but take up a lot of memory.
There's another important unsw phd thesis, too. The photographer thought about the camera angle and the focus etc, unsw phd thesis. The person who drew the schematic diagram thought about what components ought to be depicted and the way in which the components of the system interacted with each other. So the numerically small information content of the line drawing may be much more useful information than that in a photograph, unsw phd thesis.
Another note about figures and photographs. In the digital version of your thesis, do not save ordinary photographs or other illustrations as bitmaps, because these take up a lot of memory and are therefore very slow to transfer, unsw phd thesis. Nearly all graphics packages allow you to save in compressed format as. jpg for photos or. gif for diagrams files. In vector graphics as used for drawingscompression is usually unnecessary.
In general, students spend too much time on diagrams — time that could have been spent on examining the arguments, making the explanations clearer, thinking more about the significance and checking for errors in the algebra. The reason, of course, is that drawing is easier than thinking.
I do not think that there is a strong correlation either way between length and quality. There is no need to leave big gaps to make the thesis thicker.
Readers will not appreciate large amounts of vague or unnecessary text, unsw phd thesis.
UNSW 3 Minute Thesis Final 2018
, time: 4:03How to Write a Thesis
Stages in a thesis introduction. state the general topic and give some background. provide a review of the literature related to the topic. define the terms and scope of the topic. outline the current situation. evaluate the current situation (advantages/ disadvantages) and identify the gap. identify the importance of the proposed research Seventy-one UNSW PhD candidates have been awarded a Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses, Round 1 The Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses was introduced in to recognise high-quality PhD theses produced at UNSW. To receive this award, candidates must produce a thesis that requires only minimal corrections, receives outstanding and/or excellent levels of achievement for all examination criteria, and in the opinion of both examiners is in the top 10% of PhD theses The minimum requirement for admission to a PhD is: an appropriate UNSW Bachelor degree with upper second class Honours; or; a completed Masters by Research from UNSW with a substantial research component and demonstrated capacity for timely completion of a high quality research thesis; or
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