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Jul 2020
3:10pm, 28 Jul 2020
3,052 posts
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um
Knowing when to stop is a key skill !
email it, save it, keep copies everywhere. And enjoy the feeling.
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Jul 2020
3:13pm, 28 Jul 2020
19,781 posts
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Carpathius
I have saved it to my laptop and to One Drive. I don't really understand onedrive.
It took me eleventy billion years to edit and format because I just don't really understand Word either and everything seemed so fiddly and unintuitive.
To number my preliminary materials pages in Roman numerals but the main body of the text in Arabic numerals took *so* many steps! And a walk through guide on the internet.
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Jul 2020
3:14pm, 28 Jul 2020
51,488 posts
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Diogenes
Well done Matt and Carp.
As a non-academic which very little knowledge of how doctorates and masters and that sort of thing work, would I be wrong in thinking that the whole process and format of them is quite out-dated? I'm thinking of PhDs in particular. They appear to be a gruelling and grinding thing to complete, based on a traditional format, and of little extrinsic value. Of course, they shouldn't be easy, and by no means am I denigrating the achievements of those that have completed them, but is there a case for them to be completely overhauled and made more practical?
*dons mortar board crash hat*
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Jul 2020
3:17pm, 28 Jul 2020
51,489 posts
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Diogenes
I just wanted to add that I am in awe of you all. It all sounds way too niggly and exacting.
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Jul 2020
3:22pm, 28 Jul 2020
66,252 posts
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swittle
See that huge sea bird flying off into the ether? That's your dissertation, Carps. 
If ever there were a case for offering other forms of summative assessment, this is one. Obtaining a qualification should not be 'easy' but, equally, it should not cause unreasonable confusion or stress.
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Jul 2020
3:25pm, 28 Jul 2020
39,371 posts
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LindsD
Agree with you both. What's really frustrating about a PhD is that no one will ever read it.
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Jul 2020
3:28pm, 28 Jul 2020
66,255 posts
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swittle
And yet, if there is no longer the desire for dedicated people to find out, discover and reveal, can we say that we know it all?
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Jul 2020
3:33pm, 28 Jul 2020
720 posts
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Sam Jelfs
A PhD is so much more than the thesis at the end though, it should also be about producing a good researcher at the end of it, the skills required to carry out high quality work. While nobody may read the actual thesis, the vast majority of the content should be out in publications anyway, or at least conference talks. I think this is where the continental system works much better, a lot of PhD thesis are basically just a collection of already published papers, with some tweaks to introductions to join it all into a coherent story. It's also why the defence process is rather different, the work has already been judged by a group of peers to be of sufficiently high scientific standard to be published so it is hard for the committee to really argue that is then isn't good enough.
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Jul 2020
3:39pm, 28 Jul 2020
39,372 posts
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LindsD
I'm not saying that the work that goes into the PhD doesn't have value, just that the presentation of that work could be more constructive.
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Jul 2020
3:52pm, 28 Jul 2020
1,334 posts
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Grast_girl
Fantastic news Carp. 
The presentation of my thesis did send me a bit doolally at one point. I found the only way to do it was to stay on one computer until it was all formatted the way I wanted it, convert to PDF, check it all again and then print.
I think it is getting better though in terms of different formats/structures are becoming more acceptable (like the continental system). Even the actual formatting is getting better if you know how to use the functions in Word properly, although it does have a habit of thinking it knows what you want it to do, and figures still never seem to stay where you put them.
The work is the important thing. I don't really care how the work is presented as long as it's logical, but that does tend to make it look quite like a thesis once you get down to it.
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