Year 5: Thesis Submission Time!

Year 5 was the so-called final lap as a CDP student. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have 2 years to complete your thesis, the thesis is due on the fourth week of your final semester so it was more like 1.5 years. At this point I was already reviewing my results and writing the manuscript. There were a few hiccups here and there, one particular panic point was when I found mistakes in some of my code, which resulted in me running some rather last-minute simulations. Luckily I already had my fundamentals in order and I was able to quickly re-write the code and run it.

Reviewing my results was kind of fun, but also kind of frustrating. The fun part was being able to see all the pretty graphs that were a result of the hard work that I have put in the past few years. The frustrating part was trying to interpret these results, especially those that seemingly made no sense. These results could be those that defy well researched trends, or show seemingly random behavior. Luckily I had the guidance of my supervisor to tide me through this phase, he was able to provide more insight into trends that I thought didn’t make sense, and reassured me that random variation is sometimes inevitable in running simulations. His support gave me confidence to proceed and write the manuscript.

Writing the thesis was probably the most painful part of the thesis for me, as I generally prefer writing code to writing reports. Ranking the most difficult to least difficult section to write, Introduction, Discussion, Results and Methods. Introduction was the most difficult as I had very little experience with the Quantitative literature. Explaining the rationale behind the statistical methods and the formulas was especially tough, I should have taken Linear Algebra instead of Calculus instead as most of the statistical methods I encountered utilized Linear Algebra more. Fortunately, I started writing my thesis early, and was able to go through a few drafts with my supervisor, correcting any mistakes in the process.

The final hurdle before submission was formatting. The recommended format and instructions are quite vague with regards to formatting, so I downloaded some past thesis from NUS’s Scholarbank to take a look. What I realized and confirmed is that there is no fixed formatting for the thesis, the author should use his/her own judgment to decide the format that best suits the research topic. After formatting the softcopy, we had to print and bind our thesis into a hardcopy version for submission to the department.

Also quite proud to see my thesis uploaded onto Scholarbank! :D

https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/171658

Overall, the thesis was a great experience in helping me consolidate and improve my skills in coding, data management, writing and presenting. I would recommend everyone to do a thesis if possible. Even though it can be frustrating at times as it is not as straightforward as taking modules, I think the practical skills gained outweighs any content knowledge you can get from 3 modules.

Thesis After Graduation

I got a great grade for my thesis, graduated and even started working on my first job but I am still working on the thesis. Because the thesis does not end there, I decided to try and get it published.

The process has been really humbling, I felt sad when I read the frank criticisms from the reviewers. It made me feel like my thesis was really not that great after all. But addressing these criticism is one of the best way to improve the thesis and that keeps me going. Despite the sadness, I do feel myself learning much more from the reviewers compared to reading books and attending lectures. Hopefully the next piece of news regarding the thesis would be a good one!