Is it like a debate?
I have heard the phrase “write and defend a thesis” but have no idea what goes on.
Since Scribble is posting “wish me luck”, it’s a high pressure thing?
Writing a thesis is just writing a major paper – longer than anything else you’ve probably written up to that point. It requires a great deal of research and analysis.
Once you write it, it goes to a group of professors who read it. They then get together with you to ask questions about what you have said, which you try to answer. It can be high pressure, since you’re being grilled by experts in the field who are bound to pick up on any mistakes you have made. It’s not that making the mistakes disqualifies you, but you need to explain them or provide reasoning as to why they really aren’t mistakes.
Generally, most people succeed in the defense, if that’s a consolation, but it can be hard on the nerves; it’s like being the only one in the class and having three (or more) professors asking you questions about the work.
I’ve done a Master’s Level thesis and defended.
Wasn’t that big a deal, although it may have been to others. I knew exactly what I wanted to research and write about, and was excited about it.
The defense was pretty much a presentation followed by some questions. I found it straightforward.
My sense of it was that my thesis advisor would not have permitted me to go to the defense had he not been convinced I was ready to do so.
I’m sure a Ph.D level thesis is a bit more high stakes, though.
I’m in chemistry grad school. When I’ve been hear ~5 years, my adviser will decide it’s time for me to leave. I’ll compile all of my work into one massive semi-cohesive volume. I’ve been writing up and publishing work all along, so that helps. I’ll send my thesis to my comittee, which is my advisor and two other profs. They’ll ask me to make some revisions. Once everyone signs off on it, I’ll “defend” it orally. This will involve a brief (1h) presentation where they will grill me to make sure that I know enough chemistry for them to feel it’s ok to give me a PhD.
In chemistry, this defense is largely a formality. I’ve never heard of anyone failing it. They won’t let you defend if they’re not going to pass you. Hell, you won’t even get to the point of writing a thesis if they don’t think you’re going to pass. Most people leave or get kicked out ~half way through when they have their “advancement to candidacy” defense, where you have to talk about what you’ve done and what you plan on doing. The grilling tends to be much heavier for this.
I may not actually defend my thesis. The last two people who graduated from my lab did not. I think my adviser just didn’t feel like bothering with it.
From my friends who have defended dissertations, in the social sciences its not unheard of for the committee to ask helpful and uplifting questions like, “Explain why your project is not just a waste of time.” I guess they take “defend” quite literally.
I don’t know if a master’s thesis has that level of cosmic brutality.
For my genetics Ph.D. thesis, I wrote an approximately 300 page thesis (that’s including 100 pages of references). There was a one hour public seminar where I presented my work, then a three-hour private defense where my thesis committee grilled me. As previous posters have said, your thesis committee will generally not let you get to the point of defending unless they’re pretty confident that you’ll pass, but it is still an exhausting and stressful process. Mine was particularly stressful because two of the people on my committee were outside experts in my field who I had never met before, so I didn’t know what to expect. However, it ended up being very plesant and fun and we all sat around for three hours and talked about my work. Virtually all of the questions they asked were things I had thought of years ago, so I was very prepared to defend my decisions.
mischievous
I don’t know about other people, but in my experience a dissertation is not something you write and show to professors. First of all, your advisor must support your topic, and I seem to remember that your committee has to also. Then, your advisor is intimately involved in reviewing chapters as you write them. For many, you have to do an extensive literature survey, to show you know the field and that what you are doing was never done before. (I got to publish mine 
)
Managing your advisor is very important. Another grad student told me that mine tended to loop on changes, so it was a good idea to submit not just the new version but the old version with the recommended changes.
As for defense, unless there are big political issues, it shouldn’t be a big deal. I had a one hour seminar, and probably a defense of less than an hour. While the professors on your committee are experts, by this time you should be a far bigger expert on your subject than they are. (They’ve also had a chance to see your dissertation, and, assuming no political issues, should bring up any problems ahead of time.) A student failing a defense would be a slap in the face for a professor, so it is unlikely to happen. Despite the term, everyone is on your side.
I did do a Masters thesis also, but that was just before I left after my advisor died, so no one particularly cared about it, and I don’t remember any defense. I also did a short bachelor’s thesis which did involve a very brief defense, a mass one with other students and with a bunch of professors who knew nothing about any of the other subjects.
With a very sharp pencil.
There are some variations in how this is handled, but I think some aspects of the doctoral thesis process are roughly consistent in the social sciences (which is what I know best).
This process is preceded by a certain amount of coursework and a comprensive examination process. You have to get through that first. Then the thesis process begins. First, you propose a topic. The proposal needs to be well-crafted, demonstrating that you know what work has been done in this particular area and that there are unanswered questions to be pursued. It will also lay out how you propose to further the knowledge in this area. This proposal must be agreed upon by the thesis committee.
Once the proposal has been approved and you’ve given over some portion of your life to doing the research, you write it up into the thesis. The thesis will generally contain a review of literature (explaining what’s already been done in the field, as referenced above) and then will lay out the research question and the methodology you used. Then come the findings of the research, and your conclusions.
The defense is the formal public presentation of the work. You stand up before your committee and any other number of onlookers and summarize what you did and what you found. The committee asks questions that supposedly enable you to demonstrate that you are a competent scholar. At the end of the process, they agree (or not) that you’ve done the thing right, and it’s over.
It is my understanding that it is very uncommon for a person to NOT successfully defend. It is generally the committee’s job to not let you defend until you can produce something passable. If they have doubts, there are numerous other places where they can hold you up (the proposal, for example, or at pre-defense meetings). Still, that doesn’t prevent them from asking difficult or challenging questions, so many people are anxious about the defense even knowing that the outcome is pretty much guaranteed.
My major in Spain required a “Project” to be performed, written up and defended. In my case the write up is about 150 pages of text and 50 of tables. A week before, I gave copies to my advisor and two other professors.
I did a presentation and then they grilled me. Most of the time, my answer started by “as you can see in page…” i.e., by pointing out that the answer was actually in the document itself.
For graduate school in the US, at one point I had to do something similar, an “oral exam”. It was a much-shorter writeup of my work to date, presentation and defense. I was the first student to defend his oral under my advisor. All the changes he told me to do were wrong 
and of course he didn’t have the balls to admit it, he yessir’ed and ohmygod’ed all through the criticisms. I was told to do a re-write up and resubmit it (would need to re-defend or not depending on how they saw it): all I did was dig out my original file and didn’t need to re-defend. Pissed me mightily, that did…
At the time I “dropped out” of my PhD with an MS without thesis, I was missing:
- a second published article
- a research proposal which was supposed to be about “future research”, not about what I was actually doing,
- and a thesis writeup and defense explaining what i’d been doing (basically a rewriteup of publications)
You only give it a go once your adviser is convinced you won’t blow it, so it’s almost guaranteed you’ll pass, despite the feeling of pressure.
I have to say, this thread pretty much managed to knock out my terror about graduate school in one fell swoop. I didn’t realize it was such a closely monitored and guided process. I know I’ll be scared shitless when the day to defend comes (Masters or Ph.D? Dunno yet)–but now I have a rational basis for which to tell myself, ‘‘It’s just fine. They wouldn’t be letting you do this unless they thought you would be okay.’’ So thanks.
That is how it usually goes although mine was fairly stressful. My advisor had a rep for having students that took longer than average time to graduate. Although she thought this was unfair, the numbers didn’t lie. Starting with me she sought to change that and tried to push me out before I was really done. Her other motivation was that her student support load had exceeded her incoming grants and she needed to get me off the books asap.
The day of my defense, there was some discussion between her and one professor with whom I had had a somewhat adversarial relationship and it was clear that he was not a real happy camper. Combine that with the fact that one other committee member was already bitchy about me not getting my dissertation to them sooner (loving aunt died ten days earlier, but didn’t want to dignify his pissiness with the reason) and my blood pressure was through the roof. I got out by the skin of my teeth and the promise to get some more data in before the final revision was due to the grad school, but not before an agonizing 20 minutes or so waiting outside for them to decide.
Moral of the story, pick an advisor who plays by the rules, actually seems to understand the nuts and bolts of the research done in his/her group, and gets his/her students out in a reasonable time and you should do fine.
My understanding is that at the master’s degree level you write a thesis, while at PhD it’s a dissertation. I’ve never heard anyone refer to a master’s dissertation, but some folks in this thread have mentioned a PhD thesis … are “thesis” and “dissertation” actually interchangeable?
I’ll be writing a master’s thesis this time next year, and my university does not require them to be defended. I’d actually never heard of a thesis defense until this thread. I’ll still work with a thesis committee, but I just have to write it, format it, and submit it. I have no idea how or if it gets graded, or what the formal “ok, you’re all done” process is, but I hope to find all of that out on Thursday evening when I attend an on-campus Thesis & Dissertation Formatting workshop.
Wow, quite the process. But glad to hear that professors will guide you along.
I can’t imagine having to make a “defense” against one person, never mind three!
Public speaking is definitely not me!
Good luck to all who are about to embark!
Well, I don’t mean to beat back that confidence, but it’s not necessarily a carefully-monitored process. There can be a lot of floundering around (and worse) on the way to the defense, and some people never get there. And in the defense, some committee members are not above making you squirm and struggle with difficult questions–even if they intend to say “Congratulations, Dr. Olives” at the end of it.
One useful thing is that their public nature affords other graduate students many opportunities to see how departmental defenses go, well before they are the ones in the hot seat.
Olives,
A few words of warning:
They told me when I went to grad school that the most important choice one makes is the choice of advisor. Now, granted, I was a Chemical Engineering student–so life may be different in other fields. Still, within the first month of grad school, we had to settle in, and interview with at least 4 advisors, and it was recommended we interview their grad students to have a good fit with the advisor. then we turned in lists of our top 3 or 4 choices, and the advisors got to pick the students–with some tweaking to try to make both advisors and students happy.
I had a bad advisor. With the knowledge I have gleaned over (almost) decade since then, I should have tried much harder to get Dr. P–the guy with the recipe book approach, who graduated all his students 4 years down the road with PhDs, rather than the guy I had, who didn’t provide as much support as I needed. I follow directions well–but I didn’t do well with his lack of guidance.
Also, in my experience, a lot of people find out somewhere between day one of grad school and time to plan the defense, that grad school is not a continuation of undergrad, and they really wish they’d gotten a “real” job and tried to figure out whether they really wanted more education in that field that way.
Or, if you are really unlucky, the professor who swore up down and sideways that he was committed to Your University forever and ever amen, jumps ship for some other school with little warning at a point in your grad school process which is too far along to make transferring to the other school desirable, and not quite far enough for you to say “just come back for my defense, will you?” while you beg someone else to be your on-campus advisor for your last couple of semesters.
Even for the lucky ones where it is a “closely monitored and guided process”, it can be a very stressful time. Especially if you your field is one which requires you to take a qualifying exam for PhD work immediately, and you fail it. (I did. But I passed it six months later. My reasons for dropping out when I did are not something I feel like explaining in greater depth at this point. But even if you know you get another chance, failing to pass a qualifying exam is nerve-wracking).
So don’t get too unnervous, just yet.
It’s my understanding that, in North America, it’s a Master’s thesis and a PhD dissertation, while it’s the other way around in Europe.
As to the title question, since I’m supposed to defend in August and write the thesis sometime before then - if you figure it out, let me know.
At the California Institute of Technology, where I got my PhD, it’s referred to as a thesis at all degree levels. I don’t think I ever heard anyone call it a dissertation - neither in common usage nor official institute documentation.
In my department, outright failures in a thesis defense (“That work sucks. Bye.”) are exceedingly rare. Like others have said, you won’t find yourself in the defense until a positive outcome is all but assured - even if you have to sweat a little bit getting there.
Quite common, however, is for the committee to request “corrections” to the thesis.
“Corrections” is something of a misnomer, really, even though that’s the generic term used by everybody to describe them. Often they aren’t literally fixes of mistakes, but amplifications or clarifications on certain points. Somebody found Figure 4.12 a bit unclear; that wording there on page 60 is confusing. Usually they’re small changes - occasionally some major work is required.
My committee asked me to make a few “corrections”, but all said they wouldn’t need to see the document again after I’d done them as long as my advisor was satisfied. They signed the approval forms and congratulated me then and there, even though it was another week or so before The Final Version was given to the Graduate Office along with the paperwork.
That’s right, at least for North America. And true, too, not all master’s theses need to be defended; it depends on the program.
AND yes, you should pick your adviser carefully, although in my case, there was no choice, there was only one prof who was expert in this particular subfield. The other members on my committee I did select, but they only had a passing knowledge of the specific subject. Still, it shouldn’t too difficult to figure out who will be good and who won’t during your first semester.