#Difference between dissertation and thesis

[aimlayworldwide]

Know The Difference Between Dissertation Writing & Thesis Writing

In the realm of academia, the terms "dissertation" and "thesis" are often used interchangeably, leading to confusion among students and researchers. However, there are subtle differences between the two, both in terms of purpose and structure. In this article, we shed light on the disparity between dissertation writing and thesis writing, offering clarity to those embarking on their advanced academic journeys. 

Purpose and Audience 

The primary difference lies in the purpose and intended audience of the documents. A thesis is typically associated with master's programs, while a dissertation is commonly associated with doctoral programs. A thesis aims to demonstrate the student's mastery of knowledge within a specific field and is typically evaluated by a committee consisting of faculty members. On the other hand, a dissertation is an original research project that contributes new insights or knowledge to the existing body of literature within the respective field of study. Dissertations are often evaluated by a committee of experts in the field and may have a broader readership. 

Scope and Depth of Research 

Another crucial distinction between dissertations and thesis is the scope and depth of research conducted. While a thesis focuses on synthesizing existing knowledge and demonstrating proficiency in a particular subject area, a dissertation requires original research. Dissertations demand a more extensive investigation, involving data collection, analysis, and interpretation, to produce novel findings or perspectives. Dissertations typically contribute to advancing the understanding of a field or addressing gaps in existing knowledge, whereas thesis focus on a comprehensive understanding of a specific topic. 

Length and Structure 

In general, dissertations tend to be longer and more comprehensive than thesis. A thesis usually ranges from 50 to 100 pages, whereas a dissertation can span from 100 to several hundred pages. This disparity in length is reflective of the differing levels of research and analysis conducted. However, the specific requirements regarding length and structure can vary between institutions and academic disciplines, so it is essential to consult the guidelines provided by the respective program or department. 

Originality and Contribution 

As mentioned earlier, one of the fundamental aspects of a dissertation is its originality. Dissertations are expected to contribute something new to the field, whether it is through the discovery of new knowledge, the development of a new theory or framework, or the application of existing knowledge in a novel context. Thesis, on the other hand, are focused on synthesizing existing information and demonstrating the student's ability to critically analyze and evaluate existing research. 

Time and Complexity 

Given the difference in scope and depth of research, dissertations typically require a more extended period to complete compared to thesis. The process of conducting original research, collecting data, analyzing findings, and writing a comprehensive dissertation demands substantial time and effort. Thesis, while still requiring rigorous analysis and synthesis, can often be completed within a shorter timeframe. 

Conclusion 

While the terms "dissertation" and "thesis" are often used interchangeably, understanding the distinctions between them is crucial for students and researchers. Dissertations are characterized by original research, a broader scope, and a contribution to the existing body of knowledge, while thesis focus on synthesizing existing information and demonstrating mastery of a subject. By comprehending these differences in purpose, scope, length, and originality, students can embark on their academic journeys equipped with a clear understanding of the expectations associated with dissertation writing and thesis writing. 

[salvadorbonaparte]

How to set up a research journal

This is just one way you can set up a research journal but it's helping me tremendously so maybe it also works for you. My set-up is partially inspired by this video by Answer in Progress and I suggest you check out their curiosity journal.

Preparation

First you need a notebook. The trick is to find a notebook that you're not afraid to "ruin". We all want a really neat, aesthetic research journal, but the reality looks more like hasty scribbles, but that's okay, that's where the research breakthroughs happen.

I personally bought a cheap lined notebook from Søstrene Grene that I thought looked cute and put a sticker on it. That way I feel good about using it but I also don't mind when my handwriting gets messy because it was only like 3€.

You should also stock up on pens you like writing with. Different colour highlighters and post-its are also a good idea but not a must. Keep it cheap but comfortable.

Title Page

Here you should put down all the really important information: year, title, deadlines, word count, supervisors. Maybe add an inspirational quote to spice it up but keep it simple and relevant.

Key

This should either be your next or your last page. I personally use the last pages of my journal so I can add thing and find it easier. Your key is there to list abbreviations and symbols.

For example, I have different symbols for statistics, dates, new terminology, questions, breakthroughs, important notes and abbreviations for the most important terms in my field. It's shorter to write T9N than Translation.

The trick here is to have enough abbreviations and symbols to save time and effort but not so many that you constantly have to look back and forth between your page and key. They should be memorable and not easy to confuse.

Topic Mind map

If you hate mind maps you can skip this of course or use a different method but what helped me is to visualise all the topics that connect to my research project in a mind map. I then colour-coded the main groups of topics with my highlighters. It helps me to keep an overview on how many topics I need to do research on.

Proposal

If you're writing a thesis/dissertation it can be helpful to have a page set aside for your proposal and take some bullet point notes on methodology, chapter structure, research context, aims and objectives and think of some titles. You can also do this for your lit review and a list of works to include.

Hypothesis and Question Pages

I set aside four pages for this but you can adjust this to your needs. The first page is my hypothesis. It doesn't have to be fully formed yet, it can just be bullet points with five question marks. You can always revise and update it but it is important to keep an eye on what you're actually trying to find out.

The next idea is basically just stolen from Answer in Progress: a section for big questions, medium questions and little questions. These aren't necessarily hypotheses you aim to answer but questions you have about your topic that might be good to look into (maybe they lead somewhere, maybe they don't).

Research Notes

Now comes the big, fun part. Research notes are allowed to be a little messy but you should have some sort of system so you can actually find what you're looking for afterwards. I'm currently just looking at books and articles so that's what my system is based on. You can totally adjust this to include other forms of research.

What I do is that I put down and underline the author and title of my source. Underneath that I use my highlighters and mark the topic of the paper based on how I colour-coded them in my mind map. You might have to do this after you've finished reading. For example, if a text talks about censorship and dubbing in Germany, three of my topics, I will draw three lines in light blue, dark blue and red, the colours I chose for those topics. This way you can easily browse your notes and see which pages are talking about which topics.

When it comes to the actual research notes, I include the page number on the left and then take bullet point notes on whatever is relevant. These are often abbreviated and paraphrased but if something is especially important I will write down a full quote.

As mentioned earlier, I have a key of symbols I use so I can simply put down a '!' in order to differentiate a research breakthrough from a normal note. You can insert your own thoughts much more easily when you know you'll be able to tell them apart later on. At the end of each article, book or even chapter I write down my main takeaway.

Other Notes

This is your research journal and you can do with it what you want. I also added lists of films that might be relevant for my research, a list of databases and publishers to check for papers and tips on research strategy.

If you're working with interviews or surveys you could write down your questions. If you're nervous about your research you could include a list of reasons why your research project is important or why you're doing it. You can include a to-do list or a calendar to track meetings with supervisors. Anything that helps you with your research.

[gothhabiba]

The historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel

In her PhD thesis on the historical role of Tel Aviv under the British Mandate for Palestine, Dr Efrat Gilad shows that while Zionist technocrats promoted a diet of little to no beef, urban settlers enjoyed their steaks and stews. Furthermore, their love for meat led them to play a key role in the colonisation of Palestine. (23 March 2021).

In your thesis you studied colonisation in Israel through attitudes towards meat consumption. What gave you this idea and why was it a worthwhile one?

There were various indicators that meat would be a useful entry point to the history of Jewish settlers in Palestine. One indicator had to do with a surprising statistic I came across. In 2019, according to OECD statistics, the world’s leading beef consumers were Argentina, the United States, and almost tied for third place were Brazil and Israel. Israel is an anomaly on this list. The other countries that tend to lead in meat consumption are also global meat producers and exporters. Their meat industries evolved over centuries, beginning with European settlers who used cattle to colonise. As cowboys or gauchos drove livestock across vast territories dominating the land, producing and consuming meat became linked to national identity. 

Israel, however, does not produce the majority of the beef it consumes; rather, it mostly relies on imports. While colonisation is part of Israel’s past and present, Jewish settlers did not drive herds of animals to dominate Palestine’s landscape as did the cowboys and gauchos of the Americas. The ecologies and economies of livestock in Palestine were vastly different than in the above-mentioned countries. This does not mean there is no historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel – my research actually shows that there is – but that the historical trajectory that led Israelis to consume as much beef as Brazilians was different, and thus required further investigation. My dissertation is the first comprehensive history of meat in Palestine/Israel grounded in extensive archival research. 

Can you describe your research questions and the methodology you used to approach those questions?

As a historian, my methodology involves archival research and analysis of historical documents. Early on I noticed a gap between two types of sources. On the one hand, there was a clear correlation between the growing numbers of European Jews settling in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and the soaring demand for meat. This was evident in many sources including data on livestock imports and slaughter, newspaper articles on the price of meat and its availability, the building of new slaughterhouses in Palestine’s cities, and multiple disputes between consumers, butchers and cattle dealers. On the other hand, when reading through sources produced by Zionist technocrats – such as economists, agronomists and nutritionists – I noticed a vastly different attitude to meat. While urban settlers were preoccupied with gaining more access to meat, Zionist technocrats seemed determined to convince Jewish settlers to adopt a diet of little to no beef.

My work then focused on three interconnected questions: Why did Zionist technocrats oppose meat consumption? How did urban settlers create systems to allow them access to meat in a country of limited supply (and in defiance of national experts)? And finally, how did urban settlers – in creating those systems – promote the colonisation of Palestine?

What are your answers?

First, I found out why Zionist technocrats opposed meat consumption, and this was entangled in ideas about climate, nutrition and economy. Zionist technocrats adopted an idea rooted in colonial medicine according to which consuming meat was harmful in Palestine’s heat. This was a significant finding because it highlights European Jewish settlers’ alienation from Palestine’s environment, and resonates with histories of other settler colonies, allowing us to think comparatively and transnationally about colonisation. The second layer in the discourse against meat was linked to the settler colonial economy. Beef consumption depended on Palestinian breeders and regional Arab livestock merchants, and increasingly also on overseas imports. This threatened Zionist leaders’ aspirations for a self-reliant Jewish settlement, which they believed was essential to its expansion. Thus, technocrats believed, high levels of beef consumption obstructed Zionist goals.  

My second major finding shows how urban Jewish settlers ignored technocrats by generating a booming meat economy. Settlers first supported Palestine’s existing meat economy but gradually also created separate systems of import and slaughter. Because local supply chains of beef were deemed insufficient and firmly in the hands of Arab and Palestinian merchants, Jewish butchers and cattle dealers tapped into their connections to the European trade and created new networks of overseas cattle import. In creating their own meat infrastructures, especially in Tel Aviv, settlers worked to dominate Palestine’s meat trade. Whereas the literature often focuses on ideologues or rural “pioneers”, I show how urban settlers are historical agents who were perhaps oblivious or defiant of national ideologies pertaining to the meat trade but who nevertheless played a key role in a national endeavour: the colonisation of Palestine. 

[idontbelievethehype]

This isn't for you. Part 1. F.S.

Lets give Farleigh a life outside of Oliver's gaze. ;)

Warnings: drinking, some drug use, smut if you really squint, the general disgust of the upper class, Farleigh being a bitchy pansexual, Oliver is his own warning, Farleigh can't tell the difference between friendship and love. I don't write user inserts. This is an ofc based on a vague amalgamation of several people. No beta, we die and typo like men.

Farleigh was running late. Farleigh was always running late. It wasn’t something he often even clocked about himself, but this time was different. He’d made a promise to his Art of Islam tutor that he’d attend her thesis defense, and that defense was across campus in 5 minutes. He was selling her short of course. She was a million things more than a tutor to him.

Truthfully, Farleigh didn’t give a singular fuck about the art of Islam. He did give a fuck about Maggie, though, and as poor at time management as he was, he was determined to at least try to keep his promise. So he ran. It was a first.

Maggie was already speaking when he took a seat along the back wall of the lecture hall, sliding down slowly as to not make any noise. He worked hard to steady his labored breathing as silently as possible. He mentally checked out almost immediately, but his eyes never left her nervous fingers hooked together, giving each other comforting strokes as she spoke.

45 long minutes of death by PowerPoint later, Farleigh heard his own name, snapping him from his open-eyed daydreaming.

“Lastly, I’d like to thank Farleigh Start for taking the time to read through this dissertation several times over the last year. You’ve given me lovely feedback, so thank you.” Her voice was weak and rough from having spoken for an hour straight. He simply offered a nod and a smile. Truthfully, he’d only read it once and skimmed it three times. He loved the passion and fervor that worked up in her voice when she spoke about art, and that was enough.

“So, are you a doctor of art now?” Farleigh bumped his elbow into Maggie’s shoulder as they walked side by side back to his dorms. He had waited for her while she answered questions in a closed room. He was glad he’d never know that anxiety. A second class in Art History and never returning to uni again would be more than enough for him.

“I’ll find out by the end of the day, but it is usually a foregone conclusion.” She seemed calmer than she had in months. A weight had clearly been lifted off of her shoulders. It all felt a bit silly to him, but knowing Maggie meant witnessing her drive, however pointless it may seem. She needed a doctorate just about as much as he did. Far less, even. Her future was pre-ordained and quite comfortable.

He’d grown up just a couple of years behind her in age, always stuck together at functions and events. He couldn’t even count how many times they’d been sat side by side at dinner parties. He’d watched her grow from a chubby little girl who couldn’t stop talking about anime into the gorgeous, articulate, connoisseur of fine art she was today. He knew that she’d watched him grow too. He often wondered if he was just a child in her eyes, as he sometimes was in his own.

“Will you be joining us tonight?” He opened his door for her, watching as she toed her shoes off next to his bed and flung herself down, deflating after a long morning.

“Pub?” It was mostly mouthed. Sound barely came out of her. He didn’t turn the light on. There was a softness to her when she was spent that he didn’t see in other girls. He certainly didn’t see it in any of the boys he knew. Something gentle and sleepy and begging to be held.

“Can’t tonight, love. I’ve got a dinner with mum.” She lifted her arms and legs like a bug, slowly waving them about with a foolish smile, beckoning Farleigh into her grasp. “Come, smoosh me.”

“If you’re trying to be sexy, you’re shit at it.” He complied nonetheless, lying on top of her and hiking her thighs up his hips until they were interlocked on his bed. It was intimate, yet anything but sexual. It was a position they found themselves in on a semiregular basis.

“When I’m ready to be sexy, you’ll know.” She giggled and tucked her face into his neck. The heat from her breath made his hair stand on end. “You could come to dinner if you like, Farleigh.”

“Not with THE Countess of Snowden. I couldn’t fathom taking a moment of her time.” He didn’t need to see her to know that she was rolling her eyes. The relationship between their mothers had been adversarial all their lives, though it rarely trickled down to the children. For all of the caddy shit talking and passive aggressive comments over cocktails, they all summered at the same estates and enjoyed the same trappings, even if Frederica and Serena had been at each other’s throats since birth.

The thing about Maggie that Farleigh loved the most, apart from just blanket familiarity, the thing that really set her apart from every other landed gentry in their friend groups, was that Maggie never once acknowledged her birthright. It was there, sure, and it was significant. 27th in line to crown, Easter brunch with the Queen, etc, but she lived her life quietly and calmly, in the way Farleigh imagined boring middle class people did. She never pulled the rip cord for a bailout. He respected the hell out of that. It was something he was never able to accomplish himself.

“Oh come on then, you could ask for my hand in marriage,” Maggie started, exaggerating her posh accent for his enjoyment. Farleigh squeezrf her side, making her squirm into him more. “Two great houses equal in dignity.” She recited Shakespeare mockingly. To her, they really were equals, though Farleigh knew better.

“Dignity, is that what we’re calling this now?” Farleigh slid his hand down from her waste to her hip, letting the silky fabric of her trousers slip between his fingers. If she were someone else, he’d start working on the buttons, inching the zip down, easing them away from her skin. Not Maggie though. This wasn’t a game to be won. There was no trophy at the end. To comfort and to be comforted. That was all they were there for this time.  

“Drinks after, I suppose.” Maggie mumbled, lacing her fingers into his hair softly, her nails barely grazing at his scalp. “If you’re still out.”

“We will be.” Farleigh closed his eyes and let himself appreciate the feeling of her hands on him. He was rarely touched so tenderly by his lovers. Even calling them lovers was giving too much credit on both sides. “Felix has a new pet. You can meet him.”

“Oh, god. Not again.” He felt her body go slack. Maggie’s family was closed off. True aristocracy always was. They found the way the Catton’s took on strays to be intolerable, always making Saltburn a theme park for the less fortunate. Last summer, she’d called it sad. Poverty porn in how they always fed on the stories of the downtrodden. Farleigh wanted so badly to agree, but he knew in some ways he was just as much a charity case as their flavor of the week.

They parted ways around tea, Maggie going to shower and nap, Farleigh off to attend a tutorial he had put zero thought into. He loved the way his tshirt smelled of her hair, of shampoo and the scent she’d been wearing since her 16th birthday. Vera Wang Princess. Cheap and frankly pedestrian, probably purchased at Boots, it was the sort of scent he’d drag a woman for it he met her in the pub. He didn’t mind it on Maggie. It was familiar and soothing to carry her with him for the rest of the day.

Farleigh sincerely hoped Maggie would come out to the pub. He wanted to chat shit with her and maybe dance a bit, but she text him around midnight that she was going to bed. He didn’t reply. She was wishy-washy on nights out. Always a good time, but rarely in much of a mood to have one. She got horrible hangovers regardless and he’d been talking to a boy from St. Anne’s all evening who seemed interested in fooling around.

They didn’t see each other the next day, or over the weekend. This was hardly unusual. Farleigh loved her company in a different way than that if his other friends, or his cousins. He suspected she felt the same. It wasn’t necessary to keep tabs. It was annoying even. With the school year coming to a close, they were likely not to see one another until midsummer anyway.

Farleigh arrived to Saltburn with Felix at the end of term. He’d wanted to take a weekend or two in London to party, but Venetia had pleaded with them to come home. Venetia felt more like family to Farleigh than most. His little sister, faithfully awaiting his return.

They had a peaceful, though boring week as a family with the occasional entertainment of poor dear Pamela’s idiocy. She’d worn her welcome out over the spring, but Farleigh knew that the Catton’s need a bit on tension or they’d go looking for it. He quite enjoyed having someone else be the mess on the floor for them to step around.

Once Ollie arrived, though, it all felt a bit crowded. The little gremlin attached himself to Felix like a leach. No matter where they went, Oliver was there like an unsettling shadow. He was a poor lost boy. He demanded attention and care. Farleigh longed for the comfort of someone who just gave a shit if he was in the room or not.

Felix’s man-child has arrived

Farleigh sent the text already knowing the reaction he’d receive.

Well, then, I’m not coming now. Yuck.

Maggie liked to pretend she had any control over it. Of all of the places to be and families to summer with, one could do far worse than Saltburn.

Of course you are. They’ve already made up your room for you.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. The rooms had been made up for weeks for whenever Maggie and her mother planned to stop by. Hers was one of dozens of rooms that go largely unused.

Next to yours?

As God intended, my love.

When they were children, they’d build little forts with blankets and sleep side by side all summer long, never alone in the night. At home with their mothers, they were always alone. Left to their own devices. Summer was the only time Farleigh felt truly part of anything. When they got older and shipped away to boarding schools, their summers together were sometimes supplemented with bank holidays and winter breaks. The idea was the same even while their bodies were quite different.

They would talk, maybe kiss, maybe touch, maybe more. It was equal parts educational as it was erotic. To this day, when Farleigh makes a girl cum, it’s Maggie’s body he’s using as a roadmap.

She came through the doors with absolutely no fan fair. She had a way with Duncan. She seemed to disarm him. He didn’t feel the protective need with people whose stations were far higher than the family he served. She could take nothing from them, only give. And besides, he’d known her all her life.

“Good morning, lover.” She wrapped Farleigh in a hug from behind at the garden breakfast table, surprising him.  She kissed his neck, his cheek, the tip of his nose. He held his arm out as far behind himself as he could reach to not burn her with his cigarette. Almost immediately, she did the same to Venetia on her right. “Oh how I’ve missed you, my dear.”

“I didn’t even know you were coming today.” Venetia pushed Felix’s feet from the chair between herself and Farleigh to make room for their friend. Maggie had always treated Venetia with a bit more care than most others. It went a long way.

“Oh, I drove. I was only at Daylesford. Hardly a long way.” She immediately silenced the potential comments brewing within Elspeth. She knew exactly how to please her, not that she really needed to. “Mum went off to Portofino.” She cupped a hand around her mouth, allowing only Elspeth and Farleigh to see, stage whispering. “To see a man!”

This elicited a delighted laugh from all of the Catton’s who often joked about how uptight and impossible to please Lady Serena could be. Daughter of Princess Margaret, she had somehow inherited absolutely none of her mother’s good humor or sense of fun.

Suddenly, as if she felt it boring into her, Maggie seemed to clock Oliver’s unblinking gaze. “Oh, hello, you must be-“ She let the sentence linger, having never actually learned his name.

“Oliver.” Farleigh watched him make the completely wrong choice of trying stare her down, that doll-like smile on his face that had pulled so many others in. For all of Maggie’s calm demeanor and candor, she didn’t trust a soul she hadn’t known a decade or longer. There was no way in with her. No amount of charisma or flirtation could build her good will. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Ah.” Maggie raised her eyebrows, pasting a somewhat strained smile onto her own face to match his. “Sure.” Under the table, she took Farleigh’s hand. “I do hope you’ve been having a good summer so far, Oliver.”

After their somewhat tense interaction, Maggie largely ignored Oliver, and Felix too for that matter. They made plans to go to the field in the afternoon. Farleigh felt content for the first time in weeks.

“Strange, right?” Farleigh asked the second they closed his bedroom door behind him, both of them snapping into action immediately.

“Oh god, yes.” Maggie wiggled her jeans down her hips, sitting down on the edge of his mattress to kick them off. “Like a creepy porcelain doll.” She pulled her t-shirt over her head and tossed it into Farleigh’s chest. He was already half undressed himself. Maggie didn’t have a bra on. Her small chest held a sort of unexplainable, ungendered elegance. He preferred her that way.

“You should see the way he looks at Felix like he’s going to eat him or something.” Farleigh emphasized the word eat as he almost fell over trying to yank his socks off.

“I love it when you’re like this.” Maggie was down to her white cotton thong, sprawled out on his bed in a column of mid-morning sunlight. The ever-present dust from the tapestries on his walls left them in a faint, swirling fog. It felt like they were in a dream.

Farleigh stepped between her knees hanging off the bed. He ran his hands up her legs, enjoying the stubble of her unshaven thighs on his fingertips. “Like what?”

Maggie walked her fingers from the top of his hand to his chest before reaching out and pulling him down on top of her. “I like it when you’re a complete bitch.” Her eyes closed when she laughed and he laughed with her.

He shifted into her more, enjoying the way his hips forced her legs wide to compensate for their dramatic difference in size. It was his instinct to say something snide and barbed, dripping with sarcasm, but he knew he didn’t need to. He didn’t need to say anything at all.

Farleigh took his time with Maggie. He always did. They had nowhere to be but with each other. Last summer she had said he looked cast in bronze. She’d called him statuesque. Beautiful. No one else had ever described him as anything more than surface level. No one had ever looked at him long enough.

He pressed himself into her slowly, watching her lip go between her teeth and her face twist upward into a joyful smile. She craned her neck, looking down at were their bodies met. “How’s it look?” He asked with a chuckle, relishing in the way her breaths got heavier the more he moved.

“Really, really fucking hot.” Maggie spoke through a deep exhale, flopping her head back onto his bed and looking up into his eyes. “Best porn I’ve ever watched.” Her hand came up to his cheek, thumb brushing against his bottom lip. “I like to watch this too.”

“See, I like it when you’re like this.” He kept his pace slow and languid, coaxing pleasure out of her steadily. No rush.

“Talking dirty?” Her voice was husky. Her eyes still locked with his.

“No,” It came out sing-song, light. “I like it when you’re having fun.”

Movement in the window behind her caught his eye. Someone walking in the courtyard.

“Look, it’s the real-boy now.” Farleigh separated from Maggie just long enough to flip her over and slip back into her. Her ass bounced off of his hip bones. Her delighted squeal rang out through his open window so he reached forward to clasp a hand over her mouth. “Shhh, just watch him with me.”

[checkoutmybookshelf]

Rereading The Fellowship of the Ring for the First Time in Fifteen Years

The previous chapter was all grouchy wizards and atmospheric walking...and this one opens with the return of Professor Tolkien medieval literature scholaring all over the page. So let's just jump in and talk "The Bridge of Khazad-Dum."

So finding the tomb of a comrade always sucks, but context is EXTREMELY required in such cases. Unfortunately, this is the moment where Professor Tolkien rears his ugly head once again. I'm a Shakespeare scholar, and moreover I was a Shakespeare scholar at a reasonably broke school in Alaska, so I designed my thesis to not require me to go look at extant original texts. When I got to my PhD, some fuckery at an administrative level meant that when my first supervisor retired, I was dumped into the lap of a film scholar, so my dissertation because EXTREMELY about film adaptations. So I don't have firsthand experience with extant historical documents and texts, but I am aware of the process. As an undergrad, I once questioned why my text said "safety" while another text said "sanity" (and was very scoffed at before the professor actually understood the question, because I phrased it poorly). The good answer though?

Extant texts from Shakespeare's day and older are PLAGUED with slipperiness that makes them difficult to read and reproduce. They come from a time before standardized spelling, and printers often weren't that careful setting type. If they come from before the printing press, you have issues with handwriting legibility and misspellings. Then there are issues with extant documents being damaged or torn or missing pages or faded by the time we get to them, especially if they've been in private hands without the experience to properly preserve them. So the difference between "safety" and "sanity" was some editor or academic's educated guess because they had a word that started with "s," ended in "y," and was probably about six letters.

Tolkien, as a scholar with an interest in medieval texts, would have understood these issues because I'd be willing to bet hard cash that his academic work required using primary sources and original extant texts. And I'm willing to bet that because we get EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ONE OF THESE ISSUES with the Book of Mazarbul. In no particular order, here are the issues Gandalf calls out while trying to read this thing:

multiple pages are missing from the beginning

blurred words

burned words

staining (probably blood)

edged blade damage

deteriorated pages that break off

shitty handwriting

partially visible words and guesswork that goes with it

a total lack of context for any of the words you CAN make out

This book is every book scholar's worst goddamn nightmare, because you'll never recreate the whole thing, your guesses are likelier to be wrong than right, and if you don't have plot armor preserving the important stuff, you might literally end up with a description of someone's breakfast but nothing else.

I will say though, there's one thing in here that Tolkien SHOULD have been familiar with in extant texts that isn't represented here. Marginalia. Humans were humans even in the 11-1400s, and scribes and apprentices got bored while copying out books by hand. They doodled. They wrote snarkastic comments in the margins. They had to scratch things out and redo. They had cats around and sometimes little paw prints are found in old manuscripts. Like...ancient books had personality. I get where the dwarves might not have done this in their log book, especially towards the end, but I would have loved some marginalia too.

Because the first few pages of this chapter feel less like Gandalf reading the final account of the attempted Moria colony to me and more like Professor Tolkien having a moment because WHY IS THIS GODDAMN PAGE MISSING I JUST NEED THIS ONE PAGE BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, ITS FUCKING MISSING...

Academia some days, I swear.

But we get knocked out of the academic and into the adventurous pretty fast when the drums in the deep start tolling "doom, doom." And everyone loses their goddamn minds, as any reasonable person would, because we just finished hearing about the dwarves being trapped while the drums in the deep boomed.

Aragorn isn't going down without a fight though. He and Boromir get their asses on securing the door from which the immediate danger will come, with a bit of an assist from Frodo and Sting when some ballsy Uruk puts a foot through the door.

We also get badass good guy Samwise Gamgee:

When thirteen had fallen the rest fled shrieking, leaving the defenders unharmed, except for Sam who had a scratch along the scalp. A quick duck had saved him; and he had felled his orc: a sturdy thrust with his Barrow-blade. A fire was smouldering in his brown eyes that would have made Ted Sandyman step backwards, if he had seen it.

Our boy took out an ORC all on his own!!! Sam is more than capable of taking care of business and apparently he gets scary when you back him in a corner. I entirely approve, and I cannot believe we didn't get this in the movie. GIVE ME SAM SINGLE-HANDEDLY TAKING OUT AN ORC, PETER JACKSON!!!

We also get an Orc chieftain stabbing the hell out of Frodo, which was an honor given to the cave troll in the movies. This goes by pretty fast though, even for a Tolkien battle. It's kind of a one-two stab and grab before everyone makes a run for it. We do get Sam freeing Frodo by chopping the spear haft in half, but if you're reading quickly, it's easy to miss that this should ABSOLUTELY have killed Frodo. The language is pretty clear that it doesn't, and Tolkien only kind of tokenly tries a fake-out death here, since we literally just got the mithril reminder at the end of the last chapter. But I guess technically we get a fake-out death here.

It is very quickly confirmed that Frodo is alive though, with everyone being like, "Wait, you're NOT dead?" and Aragorn and Gandalf both going, "jesus christ, hobbits are tough as nail."

As we keep running from the hordes of Orcs, Uruks, and cave trolls, things start to get hot and there is firelight in places firelight SHOULD EXTREMELY NOT BE. But it does cue Gandalf about where they are, and he points everyone toward the titular Bridge of Khazad-Dum, and the exit. Now it's just a matter of hauling ass and getting out.

Unfortunately, when Legolas turns around to shoot some bitches and buy time, this happens:

Something was coming up behind them. What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which a dark form, of man-shape, maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in and to go before it. It came to the edge of the fire and the light faded as if a cloud had bent over it. Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure. The flames roared up to greet it, and wreathed about it; and a black smoked swirled in the air. It's streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it. In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left it held a whip of many thongs. "Ai! ai [sic]!" wailed Legolas. "A Balrog!"

And I just need to take a second here, because like I've said, I was more familiar with the movies than the book. And I just need Tolkien to EXPLAIN HIS DAMN SELF with this description. It's maybe man-shaped, but it has a mane? Like that does give adapters a lot of room to get creative, but WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GET HORNED SHEEP LAVA THING from??? Because that ain't in the text. I do love the drama of this description though. Like, the Balrog knows it's freaking magnificent and is going to play to all the drama that being wreathed in fire and smoke gives it. Which...ngl, I love for it. This thing is damn cool.

And I appreciate that we have FINALLY met a foe that makes Gandalf just kind of stop and go "...fuck me." Because he was starting to feel a bit OP and bored, and now he's taking it seriously, which means I as a reader should be FUCKING TERRIFIED right now, and I appreciate that.

From there, this goes down basically as the movie does, with the sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight deviation that Aragorn and Boromir get BACK on the bridge to have Gandalf's back, so they're like, within arm's reach of him as the Balrog falls and drags Gandalf down with it. But even the dialogue was lifted almost exactly from the page, so I don't feel like I need to go over this bit in much detail. It's badass, it's tragic, and it happens FAST.

And then, of course, everyone else has to haul ass out of there because the Balrog just took out your OP wizard with a flick of its wrist.

So they run, and they run a LOT for a LONG time. They run until they're out of bow-shot of the walls. And as readers, we are left with this final image:

They looked back. Dark yawned the archway of the Gates under the mountain-shadow. Faint and far beneath the earth rolled the slow drum-beats: doom. A thin black smoke trailed out. Nothing else was to be seen; the dale all around was empty. Doom. Grief at last wholly overcame them, and they wept long: some stand and silent, some cast upon the ground. Doom, doom. The drum-beats faded.

So my little headcanon here? Those drumbeats stop being harbingers of doom in that final paragraph and transform to metaphorical heartbeats for Gandalf. We know--because Pippin established it--that falls in Moria can be LONG. They take a while. The Fellowship got out of immediate danger range, and Gandalf could still have been falling. But all they have to go on is those faint, distant, slow drum-beats. The heartbeat/drumbeat comparison is so easy it's not a reach, and when they finally fade and stop, the sense is that there is nothing else for the army of evil to attack. That is--as far as anyone knows or can reasonably assume--the end of Gandalf. It's the literary equivalent of a jump cut and sudden stop of the drumroll in film execution scenes. It cues everyone that something has ended.

Well, this chapter was ABSOLUTELY not more atmospheric walking, and even though it cost us our wizard, I appreciated the tension, the fear, and the pacing in the chapter at large. The mix of breakneck action and still or slow moments to let everyone react or comment was really well done, and finally having something that actually managed to shake Legolas and Gandalf was genuinely scary.

We're going to leave it there for now, and next time we'll pick up with the aftermath of almost getting eaten by a Balrog and losing the mentor wizard of the party. We've only got four more chapters to go, so let's see what the pacing and party dynamics do as we head for Lothlorien sans wizard.

[sargasmicgoddess]

Hi there, hope you're well! I'm working on a book atm and have regular writing appointments with one of my grad school mentors (so that at least if no writing is done we at least talk about the field) and there's one thing he told me that's always stuck with me. "Never publish your dissertation; it will always be the worst piece of professional writing you ever create." Do you think there's some stock in that or are we just too critical of ourselves? (also the saucy content is always so so good, I love it as well)

That's super interesting. I've always heard the opposite. In fact, I actually DID publish my masters thesis (revised for a journal), and I fully intend on at least getting 3 or 4 papers out of my dissertation.

I must have written at least 10 papers this semester, and I think there is potential for at least a few of them to get restructured for publishing.

That being said, I don't know if it's different between disciplines. Maybe you can ask your mentor to elaborate on their reasoning?

What I have been told is that finishing my dissertation is the beginning of a journey and not the end goal. It's just a stepping stone into the world of independent research and primes you for the bigger things.

Wishing you a great adventure and much success in your doctoral studies!

Thank you for following along 😘

[qqueenofhades]

I'm about halfway through my History BA and I have a question (I pinky promise I'm doing more research than just asking tumblr academics their opinions), but this is also me assuming you did college in both the US and the UK so forgive me if I guessed wrong and am confusing you with someone else. How does graduate school in either country compare? I'm still stuck between whether I want to go for my master's or straight to PhD so obviously I'm quite a ways away from making any important decision, but considering that I'm studying British history (primarily), it felt natural to consider getting my degree(s) abroad. Are there like, any major differences you're aware of that made university vastly different, or are they more similar than I'm thinking?? Was one situation flat out preferable to the other?? If you even have strong opinions about it at all

That is me, yes. BA in the US with one year in the UK; MA in the US; PhD in the UK; now the co-director of a US MA/PhD program, so I have an appreciable amount of experience with graduate and postgraduate education in both countries. Here are the main ways in which they compare/what the experience is like in both:

In the UK overall, the experience is much more self-directed. I only had taught coursework for the first year of the PhD; the rest of it was spent in research and writing. So compared to the American system, where you take 3 years of coursework first (such as the PhD program that I currently manage) and then write the dissertation in the last year or two (hence the designation ABD, or All But Dissertation), you're thrown into the deep end from the start. I didn't have comprehensive exams, which might be a plus if that's something you have anxiety about, but the tradeoff was that I had to complete the dissertation proposal and first full-length sample chapter in the very first year, rather than waiting for year 3, and to have that be the basis on which I was evaluated/approved to continue to the full PhD degree. If you know what you want to work on and have solid supervision, this can work out and it certainly allows you to develop your topic in depth from the start, but if this is the kind of thing that gives you heart palpitations, there is that. The bright side is that you will come out with a thesis that will need less revision to be suitable as a monograph, because you've done a higher and longer amount of work upfront. I.e. I published my PhD thesis as a monograph with a major academic press within a year of graduating, which is generally rare in the US system.

As such, the US PhD experience is overall more directed/structured and leans toward more coursework than research. The research is obviously a big part of it in a way that American undergrads rarely train in (unless they go to a fancy liberal arts writing-intensive school for undergraduate, like I did), but as noted, the dissertation is central in the UK PhD system in a way it isn't (or at least not as much) in the American system. You have pros and cons for both systems, and sometimes I wished that my intensively research-centric PhD, where it was all on me to do the research, write the research, and have something to present to my supervisors on schedule for each meeting, had more taught coursework or formal/structured contact time. You have a committee in the American system, i.e. three or four academics who will oversee your defense, whereas in the UK, at least in a history program, you only have two aside from your degree supervisor: an internal reader (within the institution) and external reader (from outside the institution). While this means fewer people whose approval you need to wrangle, my viva (final defense) ended up being a Goddamn Ordeal because my external reader, despite being a friend of my supervisor, was really not suited to read a dissertation on the subject and I don't think should have been picked for it, then was extremely unprofessional about her notes/reviews/suggestions. (My supervisor likewise apologized to me for that, so yeah, It Was Bad. Academic Trauma Ahoy.)

Master's programs in the UK are also incredibly intense; they are generally one year compared to the usual two years for most US programs, and you have to complete the coursework AND write a thesis in that time, which is not something that I really recommend for maximum sanity. (Then again, if you're getting an advanced degree in history, that might be out the window.) However, if you are working on British history, then yeah, it makes the most sense to be based in a UK university, since the archives that you will need to consult will be, obviously, far easier to access than if you need to try to cram it all into one overseas academic research trip on a postgraduate student's budget. In that case, it might make sense to just apply to a master's/PhD program in the UK upfront, to smooth the transition/amount of moving around/financial misery you will have to endure. However, word to the wise that there WILL be financial misery, especially as an international student at a UK university. The Tories have yet again jacked the visa and NHS application fees (which you will have to pay upfront for every year you intend to be there) through the roof; your tuition will be much higher (though as noted in previous asks, don't go anywhere unless they pay YOU to do it) and it is difficult to get any part-time work outside of teaching or other opportunities directly related to your degree, which are subject to the uh, totally great pay rate for junior academics. (Sarcasm. That was sarcasm.)

Basically, yeah: it depends on what kind of student you are, how much initiative you like to take, how much structure you need or don't need, what sources you anticipate needing to consult and how you're going to do that, if you're comfortable starting the dissertation right away and being ready to present a finished chapter at the end of year 1, and whether you want your graduate/postgraduate experience to focus primarily on independent research or taught courses. There are no exactly right answers to these questions and you will obviously have to think about what suits you best (along, of course, the money aspect). Good luck!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Dec 11, 2023

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that "it's not enough to change a few words here and there."

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.

The four papers that include plagiarized material comprise a sizable portion of Gay’s academic work. Gay, who is Harvard's 30th president, has authored just 11 peer-reviewed articles.

"If this were a stand-alone instance, it would be reprehensible but perhaps excused as the blunder of someone working hastily," said Peter Wood, a former associate provost of Boston University, where he helped investigate several cases of suspected plagiarism. "But that excuse vanishes as the examples multiply," said Wood, who now serves as the director of the National Association of Scholars.

Some of the most clear-cut cases come in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, "Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics," which copied two paragraphs almost verbatim from Palmquist and Voss.

The paragraphs—from a paper Palmquist and Voss had presented a year earlier, in 1996—do not appear in quotation marks. One is unmodified but for a handful of words, and Gay does not cite Palmquist or Voss anywhere in her dissertation.

"This is definitely plagiarism," said Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, who reviewed 10 side-by-side comparisons provided by the Free Beacon, including the paragraphs from Gay’s dissertation, which received a prize from Harvard for "exceptional merit."

"The longer passages are the most egregious," he added.

Academics say the pattern raises serious questions about Gay’s scholarly integrity and her fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university, which has been at the center of a political firestorm under her watch, particularly since Oct. 7. Student activists have blamed Israel for the Hamas terrorist attack and Gay herself offered equivocal testimony before Congress about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

Donors, alumni, and over 70 congressmen have called on Gay to resign. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who testified alongside Gay, tendered her resignation on Saturday.

"The question here is whether the president of an elite institution such as Harvard can feasibly have an academic record this marred by obvious plagiarism," said Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University. "I do not see how Harvard could possibly justify keeping her in that position in light of this evidence."

Neither Gay nor Harvard responded to a request for comment.

Other cases of near-verbatim quotation occur in two peer-reviewed journal articles from 2017 and 2012, when Gay was a tenured professor at Harvard, as well as in an essay she published one year out of college, in 1993. Along with her dissertation, the decades-long pattern paints a picture of sloppiness, at best, and willful dishonesty at worst.

"It seems clear that Gay had a habit of using others' words in ways that violated Harvard's policies," a professor at a top research university, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s government department, told the Free Beacon. "And several examples would land any student in serious trouble."

Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.

In a section called "Suggestions for Further Reading," Gay does include Andrews’s 1991 book, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988, but not his 1992 paper, "Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888-1988," from which the offending text was drawn.

The 1993 essay "concerns me less," Riley said, given how early it was in Gay’s career. "However, it shows a quantity of plagiarism so egregious that minimally Dr. Gay should stop putting it on her CV."

The two peer-reviewed papers, by contrast, are "much more serious," Riley said.

In "Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment," Gay borrowed language from a 2003 report by eight researchers—three of them Harvard economists—prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And in "A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing," Gay borrowed language from a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, and from a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, "Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime."

Freedman and Owens are never cited, though Gay thanks them for letting her use their data. Gay does cite Schwartz and the eight researchers elsewhere in "Moving to Opportunity" but not in the sentences where their quotes appear. None of the passages have quotation marks, creating the impression that they are Gay’s own language and ideas.

Some examples are more borderline than others, scholars who reviewed them said, but clearly violate Harvard’s guide on sourcing, which requires citations even when using "ideas that you did not think up yourself," regardless of how much the language has changed. Plagiarism, the guide adds, is "unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident."

Even crediting a source in the wrong sentence, as Gay did repeatedly, is a serious offense under Harvard’s policies. The school’s sourcing guide includes multiple examples of "mosaic plagiarism," in which placing a citation too late or too early in a passage causes "confusion over where your source's ideas end and your own ideas begin."

Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that several portions of Gay’s work met the definition of "mosaic plagiarism" outlined in Harvard’s guide. So did Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a former professor of political theory at Villanova University, who said the examples "violate the expectations Harvard has for its own students."

"As a professor, I would not have accepted this kind of work from a first semester freshman," McGuire told the Free Beacon. "It’s appalling to see it in the work of Harvard’s president."

Rossman, who specializes in quantitative research, noted that some of the examples involve technical descriptions of statistical methods, which "can require very precise wording" and are often repeated between authors, a potentially mitigating factor. But an editor at one of the five most-cited academic journals in the world pushed back on that notion, arguing that even that sort of duplication in academic prose is difficult to defend.

"The text duplication points to carelessness, sloppiness, and short-cut taking," said the editor, who has edited journals in both the natural and social sciences.

Some of the victims of Gay’s plagiarism were more sanguine. Jeffrey Liebman, one of the Harvard economists who prepared the Department of Housing report, said he and four of his coauthors did "not see any signs of plagiarism." Like Rossman, he argued that it was defensible for scholars to crib technical descriptions from each other.

Gay "had the right to use and adapt this common language," he said.

Voss, who coauthored the 1996 paper with Palmquist, said that although the paragraphs Gay quoted were "technically plagiarism," they were "not terribly important" to her argument.

"If I caught a student doing that, I would tell them it was inappropriate," Voss said. "But I would never consider taking action against the student."

But Wood, the former Boston University associate provost, said the feelings of the plagiarized are irrelevant.

The "willingness of the actual author to go along with the copying (whether before the fact or afterwards) doesn't change the deceptive nature of the act of plagiarism," he said. "The plagiarist is breaking the trust of the community of readers. In the case of scholarship, the whole university community is the victim."

It is common for plagiarized authors to come to the defense of their plagiarizer, Wood said. When Princeton historian Kevin Kruse was accused of plagiarizing Ronald Bayor, a historian at Georgia Tech, for example, Bayor dismissed the accusations as "politically motivated."

Other cases of possible plagiarism—all from Gay’s dissertation—were uncovered Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Rufo and Karlstack’s Brunet. Though the revelations are new, rumors of Gay’s plagiarism have been circulating on econjobrumors.com, a popular message board for social scientists, since at least January 2023.

"Most plagiarists turn out to be serial thieves," Wood said. "If the offense is discovered in one publication, typically it will be found in others."

In a statement to the Boston Globe, Gay said she stood by the integrity of her scholarship.

The Harvard Corporation, which held an emergency meeting over the weekend after Gay’s disastrous testimony on Capitol Hill last week, did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 10:10 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Gay had not cited Alex Schwartz in the paragraph where his quote appears. She did cite him in that paragraph, but not in the sentence where she quoted him.

==

This is what happens when you hire for DEI, not merit.

In spite of all of this, Claudine Gay should not be fired for plagiarism, any more than Kendi should be rejected for his financial mismanagement. Because this misses the point.

Harvard's own paper, The Harvard Crimson, reports that over 700 staff and faculty are in support of her remaining on. They cite "university independence." Which should reasonably be taken as an agreement to no longer accept public funding, even though that level of integrity is not what they meant.

What the 700 supporters does indicate is how far and how extensively the ideological corruption has set in. That's the reason she should be dismissed. She should be let go because Harvard has decided to abandon intersectional DEI garbage as its primary telos, and to reclaim its academic integrity and rebuild its - perhaps irreparably - damaged reputation.

The problem is that, unsurprisingly, its council have officially chosen the intersectional DEI garbage over any pretence to integrity.

[thehours2002]

Any advice for getting into and getting through Masters/PhD programs? Since you're a professor and all.

well, i’m a graduate teaching fellow/adjunct professor which i promise is very different from a “real” professor, but here’s what i’ll say off the top of my head about these apps

get a professor whose terminal degree is a phd on your side! even better if they’re willing to help you go through your application closely and give you feedback on your personal statement, writing sample, etc.

in fact, send your writing for the application to as many trusted advisors as you can for feedback.

in your personal statement/statement of purpose, be as specific as possible about what your research interests are. it’s possible (even likely) that your research interests will evolve as you continue your graduate education but showing that your current interests are specific shows the committee reviewing your application that you have direction and you know what sort of thing you want your thesis or dissertation to be on (like this will of course change but i think it shows a level of maturity in your thinking about your scholarship)f

try to attend conferences and get teaching experience under your belt that you can put on your CV. i was pretty shocked that no one else in my cohort had teaching experience so it’s not *necessary* but it may be something that helps you stand out. having gone to conferences also shows that you’re serious about research and being part of the field

if you can help it DO NOT GO TO GRAD SCHOOL ON YOUR OWN DIME. especially at the phd level. if your program accepted you without giving you a fellowship then you shouldn’t be there. (i think this used to be more of a thing and has maybe dropped off). i would think that you should only be paying your way through grad school if you’re CERTAIN there’s a lucrative job on the other side of it for you. and for those of us pursuing grad degrees because we want to be professors, there usually isn’t.

if you take the GRE and your math score is low don’t worry about it if you’re going into the humanities. mine was awful and apparently they didn’t care. also, i think i took the GRE twice and did no studying in between and my verbal score shot up to 96th percentile the second time, so if you have the money it might be worth taking more than once if you think you can bump up your scores. a lot of programs are eliminating subject specific gre requirements (like a special english lit gre test or something idk i never took it) or not requiring the GRE at all. so check and see what your programs require before you invest too much time in the GRE stuff.

apply WIDELY. by that i don’t mean you should apply to a zillion places, but don’t apply to places that won’t be a good fit and don’t limit yourself by arbitrary factors like geography. i applied to places on the west coast and in the midwest and it is just sheer luck that i ended up in nyc, exactly where i wanted to be

dont be discouraged if you have to apply more than once. a LOT of this is luck of the draw and how you fit in with the current body of students and whether there are professors there who are capable of mentoring you because you share research interests

but take all that with a grain of salt because it’s just off the top of my head… and it’s been 3 years since i last did this so i’ve probably forgotten some things about the process.

[whentherewerebicycles]

Do you have any advice for forming habits and being more productive? I always end up scrolling endlessly or doing something equally mindless when I want to do something and I'm impressed by your productivity.

well in the interests of transparency i spend between six and nine of my waking hours in bed doing absolutely nothing most days, so i would not describe myself as an especially productive person (or someone who is all that good at resisting the siren call of mindless scrolling). but i do have a few good habits and some sense of what generally works for me.

to paraphrase the thesis of that book atomic habits plus Stuff I’ve Learned:

if you want to do more of something, find a way to make it easier and/or more rewarding for yourself to do the thing... OR make it deeply inconvenient not to do the thing.

if you want to do less of something, make it harder for yourself to do the thing.

if you want to build a brand new habit, the easiest way is to tack it onto something you already habitually do.

the best time to make big changes is to take advantage of (or to create) major transition moments in your life where all of your old routines are in a state of upheaval. this is not required (you can establish habits any time) but i find that it really accelerates the change.

if you engineer a habit the right way it will eventually become positively self-reinforcing and you will begin to get genuine pleasure out of doing it.

to give an example: while writing my dissertation i found myself sinking into the misery pit that is too much unstructured time. i would regularly go days without leaving my apartment, exercising, or seeing friends, and to make it worse i was mindlessly doomscrolling all the time because it was late in 2016 and trump had just won the election. i needed to make a big change to my life, so i adopted a dog. this certainly did not make leaving the house any easier (i am a creature of inertia who loves sloth) but it made it deeply inconvenient to not leave the house (because puppy Pip had more energy than I had known it was possible for a tiny 3.5lb creature to possess and if I did not thoroughly exhaust him every singe day he was a demon creature who could not stop barking and shredding things and HOWLING to be entertained). it also created long-term inconveniences: if i didn't get Pip out of the house to meet lots of new people, have lots of new experiences, and get used to lots of different places, he would grow up to be a poorly socialized nightmare dog who hated everyone. how could i do that to him! he was so small and wriggly and cute!

so in pursuit of those two goals (exhausting a terrifyingly energetic little creature + ensuring he had lots of socialization experiences), i decided to seek out a small new experience for him every day (like meeting a friend or going for a walk in a new place), and a big new experience for him at least once a week (like taking him to a bar for an extended period of time). setting a little goal like that got me out of the house every day + into more regular contact with friends (the habits I was trying to establish), but it also let me be creative in coming up with ways to satisfy the goal... and also gave me the flexibility adapt the day's plan depending on my mood (so if i really desperately was NOT feeling an outdoor walk on a particular day, i could take him to home depot and practice doing his polite greetings with people). that was nice because it helped me fight the brain's natural desire to be like DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!!! i could instead ask myself, within the parameters i'd set, what i wanted to do, and then do that.

and the habit has stuck, though after almost six years with Pip (MY LITTLE GUY IS NOT SO LITTLE ANYMORE WAHH) we don't do a new thing every day aha. but we walk every single day, weather permitting, and I still try to take him to a new trail or a new place every couple weeks. and he helps me maintain the habit by being an absolute nightmare demon creature when he feels he hasn't been walked sufficiently! (ie he makes it inconvenient for me to not do the habit lol.) it’s been such a fun way to discover cool things I never would’ve tried if I hadn’t set that goal for myself—like, we found our favorite hike in Austin because I’d run out of new things to do near our house, and we discovered that Pip is freaking obsessed with agility because I signed us up for a class to satisfy one of my “big new thing for the week” goals.

i think the best/most lasting change is that through performing the habit repeatedly over the last six years, i've come to just... think of that habit as part of my identity. maybe not the trying new things part lol but definitely the walking part. i am now just an avid walker who becomes restless and cranky if i don't get my walk in, and who feels happy and good in my mind/body when i do. so performing the habit itself (and considering it part of my identity) becomes self-reinforcing. i know how nice it is to do the thing, so even when i don't want to do the thing, i do the thing, because i am now a person who habitually does that thing. and if i am feeling resistance to doing the thing (as i sometimes am), i try to give myself that flexibility to be a bit creative. ok, so i don't want to walk the hourlong neighborhood loop... but what if i drove to a new park right down the street and spent just 20 min exploring it? usually by the time i get started, i'm grumpily like, FINE, i'm enjoying it, and WHATEVER, i'm already here, so i might as well walk for an hour, and UGH i can probably find some way to make this fun for myself if i just am a bit creative about figuring out how.

here are some other examples... these are slightly more mundane habits, but also not ones that require big life-altering changes like getting a dog:

i hate tidying up. i hate washing dishes, i hate folding laundry, i hate all the regular maintenance and upkeep required to be an adult in the world. but you know what i LOVE??? i love talking to my best friend on the phone! and she hates chores too! so often we will set aside a couple hours on a weekend or weekday afternoon where we call each other and force each other out of bed and do chores while chatting. i haven't changed anything about the task itself, but i've made it easier for myself to habitually perform the task by linking it to an activity i genuinely love (talking to my friend) and would be doing most days anyway.

another trick for chores is one that @alexenglish gave me years ago, which is: while you're waiting for something you can't not wait for, do another little task in that span of 'dead' time (something that isn't scrolling). every night i make popcorn to eat as a post-dinner snack. i have a span of about three minutes where i'm standing in the kitchen doing nothing. so every single night i use that time to load the dishwasher and wipe down the counters. i do the same thing in the morning with coffee... i start the coffee brewing and then use those 3-5 minutes to empty the dishwasher from the night before. eventually, looking for those little spans of dead time & figuring out a quick thing to do during them becomes sort of a game. it's a fun test of your creativity to be like: okay, i have this SUPER finite amount of time, so i have to very rapidly scan my environment and figure out what i can get done in that time. (i guess writing this is revealing a new element of habit formation for me lol... i am more likely to create and sustain a habit if i find a way to make it a fun little creative challenge.)

reading: i will always choose my phone over a book. always, always, always. i have a phd in literature and i ostensibly """""love""""" reading more than the average human being and yet my phone has SUCH power over me. i'm still working on actually reestablishing this habit (i sometimes get knocked out of the regular rhythm of it), but i always read a physical book while i'm eating my nighttime popcorn snack, and that span of 10 minutes or whatever is usually enough to get me into the book enough that i'll keep going for a bit before bed. i also generally have good luck with setting a timer for 20 minutes, physically throwing my phone across the room so i can't reach it, and making myself read until it goes off (i make it harder to do the thing i don't want to do, since i'd have to get up and cross the room to get my phone). i also find that if i carry a book in my purse i am a zillion times more likely to read during dead time while i'm waiting somewhere as opposed to scrolling... and if i leave a book on the coffee table i'm more likely to pick it up at least every now and then (if not habitually) and start reading a bit when i'm sitting around on the sofa... mostly because i feel guilty that i'm not reading more, lol. idk i still gotta figure out better ways to get sustained reading back into my life! i've been thinking about reading first thing when i wake up, like setting a timer and leaving my phone downstairs after i make coffee (making it harder to do the thing i want to stop doing) and then coming upstairs to read while i drink coffee in bed (stacking a new habit on top of an existing habitual action). tbd!! and i know from past experience that when i'm reading consistently i start spontaneously reading more and thinking of myself as A Reader again, because the act of reading itself is very pleasant for me and it makes me feel good (so again, it becomes self-reinforcing).

in austin i loved seeing my friend michelle but we lived quite far apart and were busy during the week so it was sometimes inconvenient to make it happen. we'd often accidentally go weeks without seeing each other. so we decided to start meeting at the public library every sunday (the halfway point between our homes & a place we both loved) when city parking was free (removing a barrier to make the habit easier to perform). we'd bring books and sit out on the library's deck for a couple hours reading. I didn’t want to perform the action (getting out of bed on a Sunday, showering, driving to a place) but I leveraged some social pressure (I didn’t want to stand up my friend) and then also made getting out of the house more rewarding (a friend + a beautiful place to read waiting for me!)

on those Sundays there was also a grocery store right near the library. i hate grocery shopping, but I’d often park right outside the grocery store, walk to the library to see my friend & read my book, and then go to the grocery store on the way home, because i literally had to walk past its open doors to get to my car. i had removed almost all obstacles to make that unpleasant task as frictionless as possible for myself. i didn't have to make the decision to drive to the grocery store (something i would've 100% wriggled out of) because i was already there... so i just went in, did my stupid little grocery shopping, and left.

these might not be the specific types of habits you want to instill in yourself! but i think, again, that the most fun part of trying to establish a new habit is reflecting on what's stopping you and getting creative about devising a solution that works around your natural human resistances or hesitations. to go back to the Pip example again: i don't always like going to new places (i am intensely a creature of habit), but i had this small beloved dog who needed to practice encountering the wider world for the very first time. it would've been VERY difficult for me to get myself out the front door if i were left to my own devices... but having a little being who was dependent on me to give him the experiences he needed to grow up to be a happy well-adjusted adult being made it one million times easier to do the thing, because it wasn't for ME anymore, it was for this little creature. figure out what motivates you, figure out all the big and little things that are keeping you from establishing the habits you want to build, and then use that knowledge to experiment with engineering systems that make it easier to do the thing you want to do and harder/more inconvenient to not do it.

my last piece of advice: focus on one or two at a time. don't overload yourself! too much change always makes me tired and cranky, and i'm much better at maintaining habits in the long term if i'm largely indulging my natural inertia and just focusing on one thing i want to change or one habit i want to build.

[pantalaiimon]

Talk about your thesis! What was it about?

Thank you kindly for taking an interest! My blog has been dead for years, I must say I'm surprised I still get anon asks :)

My thesis (not sure if it's the right word in English? in this case, it's the research project one has to pursue to get one's master's degree) was in clinical psychology.

My theoretical frame of reference was psychoanalytic in nature, but doubly so, as I tried to use both Freudian and Jungian perspectives and have them not only coexist but also answer each other, for some extra fun. That means it's theoretically quite dense, especially for the profane. I'll try to make it more accessible here.

I applied those psychoanalytic theoretical models to perinatal psychology, in which I've specialised. The subject matter was differences in psychological functioning right after having given birth, when one is a first-time mother vs not so. A number of very specific and seemingly abnormal phenomena take place in women's psyche surrounding pregnancy and childbirth - which are actually not abnormal at all when put in that context. Still, that mental upheaval is quite something, lots of stuff from early childhood can come back up, and women are more vulnerable. It can actually help bring about a lot of change in their general mental health, and doing psychotherapy in that time period can be very beneficial and effective. So I was basically trying to map out various unconscious dynamics in mothers and how they differ between it having been their first pregnancy or not.

I found that after just becoming a mother for the first time, the unconscious mind is quite busy trying to deal with the new layout of transitioning from daughter to mother, and that there is little availability for relationships, and sense of identity is quite hard to maintain. For second or third time mothers, that upheaval is less massive, they've already gone though those changes the first time around, but they now deal with even older stuff as well as figuring out the ins and out of sibling rivalry. Outside of those very specific topics, their sense of self is stronger than first time mothers, and they have more psychic energy to invest in relationships.

On the more Jungian side of things, I've found that pregnancy appears to be potentially quite initiative and transformative for the feminine psyche, and that symbols emerging from the unconscious at that time can have a significant impact in furthering one's knowledge of oneself, and could be useful in therapy around that time.

I think that about covers my almost 200 pages long dissertation in layman's terms, and I sure hope I managed to make it understandable!

I'll just copy and paste the abstract I had to write in English, to give my answer that extra scientific and pompous flair, but feel free not to read any further lol:

"The aim of this study is to analyse the differences in psychological functioning between primiparous and multiparous parturients in the immediate aftermath of childbirth. To this end, qualitative methodology was employed through the projective TAT test, which was administered to six primiparous and multiparous parturients, following a semi-directive pre-interview. Formal analysis of their TAT narratives revealed a greater emergence of the primary process in the primiparous women, who regressed to a paranoid position in the face of representations of oedipal triangulation and the maternal imago. Their identity and object markers are confused, unlike those of multiparous mothers, who nevertheless regress more easily into the archaic. Dream analysis should enable us to preferentially investigate their collective unconscious."

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

https://www.tcd.ie/tceh/blogs/vikings.php

Author Tenaya Jorgensen

What happens if when archaeologists excavate a Viking grave, but find no body inside? Are the grave goods found within enough to determine the identity – either sex or gender - of the individual? Perhaps it is time for archaeologists and historians to challenge their assumptions regarding the relationship between artefacts and gender. In order to move forward, we must also look back by re-examining the corpus of existing identifications and the reasons why those identifications were made in the first place.

My PhD dissertation is not about sexuality and gender. I had not intended to take a strong stance on gendered-issues, as my thesis attempts to chart an interdisciplinary macro-history of the Early Viking Age (790-920 AD). As such, there seemed to be little room within my area of study for the finer ruminations required for the discussion of identity politics.

But then I began to catalogue Viking Age Graves across Western Europe, and what I found - well, it bothered me. Of the 64 burial sites in Ireland, only 33 of these sites contained human remains. Of the remaining 31, the cemeteries and single burials were identified solely through grave goods. Similarly, in Scotland, 31 burial sites out of 60 evidenced human remains. The other 29 were, again, identified by Viking Age objects.

Why do we sex and gender Viking graves that contain no bodies?

While it is understandable that graves may be correctly identified through the use of grave goods, I was struck by the confidence with which scholars identified burials as either ‘male,’ or ‘female,’ depending on the assemblage provided.

For example, in the 1940s, Sigurd Grieg compiled Viking Antiquities in Scotland for Haakon Shetelig’s six volume compendium on Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland(1). Although now over eighty years old, Grieg’s work remains the most comprehensive survey available on Viking Age burials in Scotland. Only a few individual corrections have been made, but Grieg’s survey as a whole has not received any extensive updates, and these updates are much needed.

Grieg states that in 1862, “the skeleton of an aged man, interred with a sword and possibly with a shield,’ was excavated at Ardvonrig, on the Isle of Barra, in Scotland. Also discovered were a tortoise brooch, bronze brooch, bronze peninsular brooch, and a needle case, “evidently belonging to a woman’s grave.” The problem is, only one set of human remains was found. Despite the lack of a second body, Grieg stated that the “mound probably contained a double grave for a man and a woman.”(2) His assumptions were based only around the suggestion of weapons within the grave - no other justification was provided.

Fast forward to 1990, when Kate Gordon at the British Museum re-examined the excavated objects. She ultimately determined that the sword was not, in fact, a weapon, but a weaving sword/baton, while the shield was a pair of heckles, which are also textile equipment. Armed with the findings of her reanalysis, Gordon suggests that the individual buried at Ardvonrig, “in absence of osteological sexing, was almost certainly a female.”(3)

However, even Gordon’s reanalysis bothered me, for why must the individual buried on the Isle of Barra have been almost certainly a female? Marianne Moen’s 2019 PhD thesis, Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape, brilliantly examines this question by analysing common practices and separating exceptions from the rule.(4) That is to say, while women are often buried with textile equipment, and men are often buried with weapons, that does not mean that it is always so. This, of course, brings up a further difficult point regarding sex and gender. According to Jennifer Tseng in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, “sex refers to the biological differences between males and females. Gender refers to the continuum of complex psychosocial self-perceptions, attitudes, and expectations people have about members of both sexes.”(5) The former is much more straightforward - if we have a body, that is.

Gendered practices in Viking graves

There can be no conversation about gendering burial practices without mention of the Birka warrior. In 2017, archaeologists confirmed that a burial containing weapons could be positively associated with a female skeleton (Bj.581) through DNA analysis.(6) Response to their publication was swift, and the debate centered around whether the presence of weapons conclusively affirmed that the woman was, in fact, a warrior. The authors, with the addition of Neil Price from Uppsala University, offered a more nuanced take in 2019 when they published, ‘Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581.’ While the first article meant to primarily address the genomic analysis, the latter article took greater care in examining the implications of both Viking Age funerary practices and archaeology, and ‘the ways in which we engender the societies of that time.”(7)

So how do we engender the Viking Age? Our representations of the Viking Age are coloured by societal norms of the 20th and 21st centuries - especially in popular culture and outside the confines of a sometimes rather sterile academic environment. That is to say, male biological sex was often synonymous with a man’s gendered identity, and that the role of a warrior was exclusively associated with men and males. As the authors of ‘Viking warrior women?’ themselves acknowledge, ‘the same interpretation [that the body of the warrior belonged to a man] would undoubtedly have been made had no human bone survived at all.’ While these authors suggest that this automatic conflation between men and swords was a product of its time (i.e., the late 19th century), they fail to acknowledge that these types of genderings are still occurring. Furthermore, we know these associations are still occurring today, because the survey of Ireland’s Viking Graves was only published in 2014, and in this survey, bodiless weapon burials are gendered as male.(8)

If we think twice about suggesting the presence of a male when a sword is discovered, can the truth also be said in reverse? If textile equipment is excavated, such as the baton and heckles found on Isle of Barra, does this mean we must automatically attribute the burial to a woman? While no biologically male burials have currently been identified with textile tools, many of the sites contain bodies of indeterminate sex - or simply no bodies at all. Furthermore, what of burials that contain both textile equipment and weapons, but with remains too insubstantial to be analysed for sexing? Moen states the simple and obvious truth: “we are simply asking the wrong questions. Perhaps less rigidity in expected gender roles may be the answer to how to interpret such apparently transgressive burials.”(9) Perhaps less rigidity in sexing burials is needed as well - for we have no sex without a body, and gendering burials based solely on grave goods can only limit our understanding of the people who lived during the Viking Age.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

what’s ur dream job

My dream job is "something that's like a combination of two of my other dream jobs -- but, unfortunately, all three of these things are real jobs I've done, albeit in different fields than I expect my new job to be."

(1) I've said this before but I'm a huge, crazy, nerd love-obsessed fan of the Iliad. Even as a grad student in English I couldn't bring myself to take on Homer as a thesis topic, but I couldn't stop myself from reading it, either, and I wrote a very long paper in college about what I found "interesting" in the Iliad (that is, what made me feel as though I were having some sort of intense visionary experience as I read it), because it seemed like that would produce new insights about what Iliad was "for" and what its "message" might be. It's an area of research I'm very interested in.

(2) I'm fascinated by weird non-Western religions. In college, I got an internship to work on a book about Christianity in Papua New Guinea, which I would have taken on even if I hadn't also been taking a course called "Globalization and Christianity," which I would have needed to take even if I weren't going to a conference that was discussing issues of "cross-cultural comparative research in Christianity." In addition to being a cool project, this course seemed to be teaching me that I might have a chance to do "globalized Christianity" research without needing a dissertation on "the Iliad of Christ," and that might be an extremely interesting career goal.

(3) This one comes up in grad school less often (since grad school is a self-sabotaging enterprise for me) but when I do run into it, I'm fascinated by some aspects of what I do as a data scientist -- the "systems thinking" necessary to interpret results from a statistical regression (e.g. identifying relationships between variables), the "machine learning" necessary to produce models that behave like the kind of statistical regression one is interested in running, the "model building" necessary to get such models to do the things one wants. There's a kind of magic to it to me.

[helpforthesis]

Role of Editing and Proofreading in Research Writing Assistance

Role of Editing and Proofreading in Research Writing Assistance

Research Writing Services is a rigorous and demanding process that culminates in the creation of a paper, thesis, or dissertation that must communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely. After countless hours spent researching, drafting, and revising, it can be tempting to submit the final draft without further review. However, the crucial steps of editing and proofreading are vital to ensuring the quality, accuracy, and professionalism of the final piece. These processes can elevate the clarity of your argument, correct technical errors, and make your work more persuasive to your audience.

In this blog, we will delve into the role of editing and proofreading in research writing assistance, highlighting why they are essential and offering practical strategies for incorporating them into your writing process.

Editing vs. Proofreading: What’s the Difference?

Though editing and proofreading are often discussed together, they are distinct stages in the writing process that serve different purposes.

Why Editing and Proofreading are Crucial in Research Writing

1. Clarity and Precision of Ideas

Editing plays a critical role in enhancing the clarity of your arguments and ensuring that your readers can follow your line of reasoning. Research writing often involves dense, technical language, so refining sentences to be clear and concise can prevent misinterpretations or confusion. Moreover, during the editing process, you can eliminate redundancy, clarify ambiguous points, and refine your language to convey your ideas as precisely as possible.

Proofreading complements this by ensuring that typographical errors do not undermine the clarity of your work. Even minor mistakes, such as misplaced commas or incorrect word usage, can detract from your credibility as a researcher. Carefully proofreading your work guarantees that your language is as polished as your ideas.

2. Logical Flow and Structure

In research writing, a logical structure is key to guiding the reader through your arguments and findings. During the editing process, it’s essential to assess the organization of your paper—whether your introduction sets up the research question effectively, whether your literature review is comprehensive, whether your methodology is well-explained, and whether your conclusion ties everything together seamlessly.

Editing allows you to reorganize content, if necessary, to ensure that the flow of information is logical and coherent. This might involve restructuring paragraphs or even entire sections to better support the narrative. By doing so, you improve the readability and persuasiveness of your research.

Proofreading at this stage helps to catch any remaining inconsistencies in formatting, headings, or transitions between sections that might disrupt the flow of your paper.

3. Eliminating Errors and Enhancing Professionalism

Errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling can damage the credibility of your research. Even the most ground breaking ideas can be overshadowed by sloppy writing, distracting readers from your core arguments. Editing meticulously ensures that your paper is free from such errors, enhancing its professionalism.

Furthermore, proofreading is essential for ensuring that your work adheres to the correct academic style guide. Whether your field requires APA, MLA, Chicago, or another citation format, proofreading helps you ensure that all citations, references, and footnotes are accurate and consistent.

Practical Strategies for Editing and Proofreading

Now that we’ve established the importance of editing and proofreading, how can you effectively incorporate these steps into your research writing process? Here are some strategies to ensure that your paper is polished and professional:

Conclusion

Editing and proofreading are indispensable components of the research writing process. They ensure that your ideas are communicated clearly, your arguments are logically structured, and your paper is free of errors. By dedicating time and effort to these final stages of writing, you enhance the overall quality and professionalism of your work. Remember, even the most well-researched paper can be weakened by poor presentation, so don’t skip these crucial steps. Through careful editing and proofreading, you can ensure that your research is presented in its best possible form, contributing effectively to your field of study.

Visit Our Website: https://helpforthesis.com/writing-research-paper-service.html

[thesiswriting01]

Mastering the Thesis Writing Format: Essential Tips and Practices

The thesis writing format is not just about following rules—it's about presenting your research in a logical, coherent, and professional manner. A well-formatted thesis enhances the readability of your work, making it easier for your readers to follow your arguments, understand your findings, and appreciate the significance of your research. Whether you are writing a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation, adhering to the correct thesis format is crucial for academic success.

Key Components of Thesis Writing Format

When it comes to thesis writing, different institutions may have specific requirements for formatting. However, several key components are commonly included in a standard thesis format:

Title Page: The title page is the first page of your thesis and includes the title of your thesis, your name, your institution, your department, the date of submission, and the name of your supervisor. The title page should be formatted according to your institution's guidelines, which may specify the font size, spacing, and layout.

Abstract: The abstract is a concise summary of your thesis, typically between 150 and 300 words. It should provide an overview of your research question, methodology, key findings, and conclusions. The abstract is usually placed immediately after the title page and is often required to be on a separate page.

Table of Contents: The table of contents lists all the sections and sub-sections of your thesis, along with their corresponding page numbers. This section helps readers navigate your thesis and should be well-organized and easy to follow.

Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your research by providing background information, stating the research problem, and outlining the objectives and scope of your study. It should also include a brief overview of the thesis structure.

Literature Review: The literature review provides a critical analysis of existing research related to your topic. It highlights gaps in the literature and establishes the context for your research. This section should be organized thematically or chronologically, depending on your thesis format.

Methodology: The methodology section describes the research methods you used to collect and analyze data. It should include details about the research design, data collection techniques, and any tools or instruments used. This section is crucial for demonstrating the rigor and validity of your research.

Results: The results section presents the findings of your research, often accompanied by tables, charts, or graphs. This section should be clear and concise, focusing on the data rather than interpretation.

Discussion: The discussion section interprets the results, explaining their significance to your research question and the existing literature. This is where you can highlight the contributions of your research and discuss any limitations or implications.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the key findings of your research, restates the research question, and suggests directions for future research. It should provide a clear and concise summary of your thesis.

References: The references section lists all the sources cited in your thesis, formatted according to a specific citation style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago). Accurate and consistent citation is essential for academic integrity.

Appendices: Appendices include supplementary material that supports your research, such as questionnaires, interview transcripts, or additional data. Appendices should be clearly labeled and referenced in the main text.

Essential Tips for Mastering the Thesis Writing Format

Follow Institutional Guidelines: Every institution has specific requirements for thesis writing format. These guidelines may cover aspects such as font size, margins, spacing, and citation style. It is essential to familiarize yourself with these guidelines early in the writing process to ensure that your thesis meets all the necessary criteria.

Be Consistent: Consistency is key in thesis formatting. Ensure that headings, subheadings, font styles, and spacing are consistent throughout your document. This includes using the same citation style for all references and maintaining uniformity in the presentation of tables and figures.

Use Clear and Descriptive Headings: Headings and subheadings play a crucial role in organizing your thesis. They should be clear, descriptive, and reflect the content of each section. Using a consistent hierarchy of headings (e.g., main headings in bold, subheadings in italics) helps readers navigate your thesis easily.

Pay Attention to Detail: Small details, such as page numbers, margins, and line spacing, can have a big impact on the overall presentation of your thesis. Make sure that all pages are numbered correctly, and that margins are set according to your institution's guidelines. Double-check that your thesis is free of typos, grammatical errors, and formatting inconsistencies.

Use Thesis Paper Format Templates: Many institutions provide thesis paper format templates that you can use as a starting point for your thesis. These templates are pre-formatted with the correct margins, font styles, and section headings, making it easier to adhere to the required format. Using a template can save you time and reduce the risk of formatting errors.

Consult with Your Supervisor: Your thesis supervisor is a valuable resource when it comes to formatting your thesis. They can guide the appropriate thesis format and offer feedback on your work. Regularly consult with your supervisor throughout the writing process to ensure that your thesis meets the required standards.

Proofread and Edit Carefully: Before submitting your thesis, take the time to proofread and edit your work thoroughly. Look for formatting errors, typos, and inconsistencies in your writing. Consider asking a colleague or friend to review your thesis for additional feedback. A well-polished thesis reflects your attention to detail and commitment to academic excellence.

PhD Thesis Format: Special Considerations

If you are working on a PhD thesis, the formatting requirements may be more stringent and detailed than those for a master's thesis. A PhD thesis format often includes additional sections, such as a statement of originality, acknowledgments, and a list of publications resulting from the research. It is essential to follow the specific guidelines provided by your institution for PhD thesis format, as these documents are subject to rigorous academic scrutiny.

Conclusion

Mastering the thesis-writing format is a crucial aspect of the thesis-writing process. A well-formatted thesis not only enhances the readability and professionalism of your work but also ensures that your research is presented in the best possible light. By following the essential tips and practices outlined in this guide, you can confidently navigate the thesis format requirements and produce a polished, high-quality document. Whether you're writing a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation, paying attention to the details of the thesis paper format, adhering to your institution's guidelines, and maintaining consistency throughout your document will help you achieve academic success.

[goccoedu]

PGDM vs MBA Which is better?

the Key Differences Between MBA and PGDM

When considering a postgraduate management program, two popular options stand out: the Master of Business Administration (MBA) and the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM). Both programs aim to equip students with essential business and management skills, but they differ in several key aspects. This article will explore these differences to help you make an informed decision about which program suits your career goals.

MBA: Master of Business Administration

1. Degree: The MBA is a degree program awarded by universities. As a formal degree, it carries a certain level of prestige and recognition, particularly important for those seeking a career in academia or certain corporate sectors.

2. Affiliation: MBAs are offered by universities affiliated with the University Grants Commission (UGC). This affiliation ensures that the program adheres to standardized educational norms and quality benchmarks set by the UGC.

3. Curriculum: The curriculum of an MBA program tends to focus more on the theoretical aspects of management. Students delve into comprehensive studies of business theories, principles, and frameworks, which provide a solid foundation for understanding complex business environments.

4. Duration: The typical duration of an MBA program is two years. This period includes coursework, projects, internships, and often, a final dissertation or thesis.

5. Recognition: MBA degrees enjoy global recognition, making them an attractive option for students aiming for international career opportunities. The structured and widely acknowledged nature of the degree can be beneficial in various professional scenarios.

PGDM: Post Graduate Diploma in Management

1. Diploma: Unlike the MBA, the PGDM is a diploma program. While it may not carry the same formal weight as a degree, it is still highly valued, especially in certain industries and among employers who prioritize skills over titles.

2. Autonomy: PGDM programs are offered by autonomous institutions that are not affiliated with UGC. This autonomy allows these institutions to design and update their curricula more frequently, ensuring that the courses remain relevant to current industry trends and needs.

3. Curriculum: The curriculum of a PGDM program is typically more practical and industry-oriented. It emphasizes hands-on learning, case studies, internships, and real-world business scenarios. This practical approach is designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in dynamic business environments.

4. Duration: Similar to the MBA, the PGDM program usually spans two years, covering extensive coursework and practical projects aimed at developing managerial and leadership skills.

5. Recognition: PGDM programs are recognized by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). While they may not have the same level of global recognition as MBA degrees, they are highly regarded in India and by industries that value practical experience and industry readiness.

Key Differences Summarized

Degree vs. Diploma: MBA is a degree, while PGDM is a diploma.

Theoretical vs. Practical: MBA programs focus on theoretical knowledge, whereas PGDM programs emphasize practical skills.

University vs. Autonomous Institutions: MBAs are offered by universities, while PGDMs are provided by autonomous institutions.

Recognition: MBAs have global recognition, whereas PGDMs are primarily recognized within India and by specific industries.

Choosing the Right Program for You

Choose MBA if:

You prefer a degree over a diploma.

You are interested in a more theoretical and research-oriented approach.

You seek global recognition and opportunities.

You aim for a career in academia or specific corporate sectors that value degrees.

Choose PGDM if:

You favor a practical, hands-on learning experience.

You want to develop industry-specific skills and knowledge.

You appreciate autonomy and flexibility in the curriculum.

You aim to work in industries that prioritize skills and practical experience over formal degrees.