| This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_. I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower... and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the horrors of writing an introduction... The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings, ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!). Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares about... That's what being an academic is! If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be pointless for you. The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested (again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic" systems... Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake. |