Image of a PhD dissertation courtesy of raffyd at flickr – reproduced under a creative commons licence.
My 2009 began in a very sober mode (if not mood) – today was the deadline for finishing the edit of my PhD thesis recommended by the panel at my final seminar so it can go forward to external examiners after being checked by my supervisor. So, after Boxing Day, I locked myself away from the world, and with my flatmate being away for the week, hardly spoke to a soul while I madly edited and refined and revised. Obviously, I was quite immersed in the totality of the dissertation and all its pathways and byways (which it was my task to smooth out somewhat), but what I think kept resurfacing in my mind was the need to write an acknowledgements page. I hadn’t realised til I checked the guidelines for formatting a thesis at QUT that this was actually required – my first impulse was to make it as minimalist as possible to avoid the temptation to tell the long and very emotional story of the whole journey towards Doctoral graduation (and make no mistake, every PhD student and PhD has one). But in the end, I enjoyed composing it, and unlike the acknowledgements in my honours thesis ten years ago, I resisted the temptation to include multiple Latin tags. I contented myself with one – from Virgil’s Aeneid – Book 1, line 33:
Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!
[That translates to something like - "what a long hard labour it is to found the City of Rome!"] Make of that what you will… for me it’s got multiple meanings and resonances.
I remember once reading a review of a book on Freud’s footnotes, which I thought was a grand idea. I wonder that no one has thought of writing a book about the acknowledgements in books (and theses). But perhaps I’m alone in finding them quite fascinating? There’s the obvious sociological interest – how much can be inferred from the once standard “and thanks to my wife for typing the manuscript”? But there’s also something to be learned about the personality of the author – even if they’re lapidary in their expressions of gratitude and obligation.
Armour we a rum quay canoe.
And what did your spellchucker (if you use one, I never do) try to do with the tag?
Ha!
I turned my spellchecker off long ago!
I always read them – enjoyed writing mine for the PhD. That was the best part!
Yep!
Since there’s now the “phd by publication” – ie string a few journal articles together with a commentary – I think they should introduce the “phd by aphorism” – I mean – Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Blaise Pascal, Michel Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc, etc. That would make the whole process of writing more fun… and save trees, and allow examiners to write reports without having to skim the whole 250 pages!
Now brace yourself as you transfer from the sheltered institution of uni life into the chaos of the real world…
Oh, dude, please! The reason why it took me so long to finish the damn thing was that I entered “the real world” after my scholarship expired! (And incidentally was inhabiting it before I descended into phd-dom…) Anyway, QUT really does do a good job of living up to its “real world” slogan with impenetrable bureaucracy…
Among the “formatting requirements” should be “No PhD will be awarded by QUT unless Kafka is mentioned in the text of the dissertation” – incidentally, a hurdle I have crossed!
PhD by anecdote!
Just wait for my forthcoming novel, Lefty E – lightly disguised (to protect innocent parties) epistolary text in the form of emails about why teh thing isn’t finished yet!
Lefty E and Mark, you’ve left out some of the more dodgy ‘PhD by Thinly Disguised Autobiography’ programs. I’ve read one Creative Writing PhD ‘thesis’ by someone who fully expected to get his/her PhD without setting foot in the library, about which s/he was phobic. (NB this is not a mass diss; some of the Creative Writing PhD programs are stringent and demanding.)
1984 @ #5, I’m hoping that was a joke, but if it wasn’t, give me a break. You want chaos, step onto any campus and say the words ‘ARC grant application’, just for a start. And even without that, if scholarship (particularly doing a PhD) is not the real world then nothing is. Despair, poverty, ambition, rivalry, poverty, juggling one’s social and emotional life with one’s work, despair, blind alleys, poverty, drama, poverty, dreams of wanting to kill supervisors/administrators/persons in authority, and despair. Did I mention poverty? It’s a blood-spattered jungle in there.
Bloody hell, Mark. I’ve heard of the Labours of Herakles, but you may be setting your readers up for disappointment with that sort of comparison. Did you at least have the good grace to acknowledge Dido for her assistance?
Congratulations! It’s a nice way to start the year! And, by the way, you’re not alone in your obsession about acknowledgements.
PC @ 9,
Yeah. It still gives me nightmares and I only did an MA with a brilliant supervisor. Did try a Ph.D after that, but gave up. Couldn’t face another 4 years of it.
Good luck, Mark.
What intrigues me about writing an acknowledgements page is that it makes you think hard about who really did help and how they helped, and the answers are often quite surprising. I once found myself fantasising about acknowledging those who’d helped and then outing those who’d hindered, but I think it’s against the law.
I second that notion jorge,
Congratulations Mark, there is little doubt about it, the best type of thesis is a completed one.
Now the fun part, waiting for someone to dissect the last 3-ish years of your life and give it a rather arbitrary value. Ah, the system works.
PinkyOz.
Hmmm. Are references to Kafka required for more scientifically and engineering-oriented PhDs too?
That said, I’m pretty sure that there would have been room for a Kafka quotation or two in my dissertation – computer software can often feel like the bureaucracy in The Trial…
Also depression, poverty, substance addiction, poverty, badly designed progress report forms, complaints to the university payroll office which were never responded to, poverty, tensions with flatmates who neither share nor understand your obsessions, poverty, and worst of all despondently contemplating life without the scholarship as it nears expiry date.
it may or may not be pertinent to mention that the Australian Workers Union and the NSW Teachers Federation were not mentioned on my ‘Acknowledgements’ page.
Robert,
I remember telling a friend who had studied law about anti-patterns in computer software architecture, she remarked on how legislation seems to display similar anti-patterns. My favourite is the big ball of mud.
I don’t think my acknowledgments page did justice to the trials and tribulations of a PhD that took six and a half years to complete…
My PhD was more like the siege of Leningrad – a bitter, cold struggle; defending ideas I no longer believed in – with only the greater fear of compete annhiliation by hostile forces driving me on through the snow.
Except it took a lot longer than 900 days.
Glad I did, but, ay!
And here’s a . picture of me at my graduation
(No, I never DO tire of that one)
Never did get around to finding a nice quotation from Kipling or Tennyson to round out my thesis on monsoon variability. However I did put this up at the beginning of my thesis defence, to general bemusement. It’s from The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball:
Student (Rowan Atkinson): A monsoon is a long white pole you stick out the window to scare the birds away, while a mongoose is a mediaeval Hungarian stomach pump.
Quizmaster (John Cleese): No, I can only give you half points for that. The correct answer is: a monsoon is a big wind, and a mongoose … isn’t!
Might have looked a bit classier if I translated it into Latin. Sounds like you survived your own thesis defence OK Mark. I once heard (friend of a friend) of someone who found the experience so traumatic she forcibly repressed all memory of it. Hate to think what substances that would have required!
I was too busy finishing the main text as I had to be on a boat to England the very next morning (nothing like a shiping deadline to motivate one to finish) so I got a friend to write the thing for me. It thus reflected my good friend’s style – somewhat more flowery than mine – than how I might have written it, time permitting.
That’s not an acknowlegment. Now this is an acknowledgment.
Pavlov’s Cat @13
You can out those who have hindered you as long as public exposure is purely accidental, as occurred after Samuel Johnson wrote to his patron, Lord Chesterfield, after the Dictionary was published and Chesterfield gave it a positive review:
In the Dictionary itself, Johnson confined himself to providing the following definition:
Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
Superb and artfully quoted reference there MikeM.
The acknowledgment I’ve been saving up for my next publication.
“To my grammar school teachers who taught me how to read and write the english good.”
Congratulations Mark. I remember that a “manic phase” during my PhD was mild depression!
I think The Amazing Criswell furnished us with the definitive comprehensive acknowledgement when he sweepingly declared in his inimitable style: “The incidents! The places! My friends we cannot keep this a secret any longer! Let us punish the guilty; let us reward the innocent.”
Dr. Cat: ‘…dodgy “PhD by Thinly Disguised Autobiography”…’
Well I say why not. After all, if we can have US Presidency by Dodgy Autobiography, anything’s game…
Not quite an acknowledgement, but you can’t go past Shane Maloney’s disclaimer at the beginning of The Big Ask.
Liam — Also not technically an acknowledgement (well it is really, if only in a literal sense) but let’s not forget the famously creepy dedication page to the famously creepy “House of Leaves”: to wit — “This is not for you.”
QUT, in my fevered memory at least, is a much more difficult place to reside than the ‘real world’. Congratulations on completing you PhD.
Perhaps you should also include an unacknowledgements page. You could leave it blank, but all people who know in their hearts that they were supposed to help you, but didn’t, would know where they belong (if not present in the acknowledgements page).
Pergratum est mihi quod tam diligenter librum magisteri bloggi scribum consummatumque est.
Ave, O Doctore!
I obtained a job outside academia a few months before submitting the thesis. Best thing I ever did.
Just wanted to acknowledge all the kind things said on this thread!
This has given me the laugh I need as I sit up late at nights trying desperately to finish my honours thesis with the view of one day accomplishing a PhD. I try not to think too much about who I would love to strangle for hindering…I mean helping me during this phases.
Congrats on getting it finished.
Thanks, Kristie, and good luck!