It’s that time in my PhD program where the scary issue of the “thesis” begins it’s ritualistic haunting. What is your thesis going to be about? Do you have an outline yet? Who is your committee going to consist of? Ahh! Too much! So I do what I do best under stress: take a deep breath and see what other people have done. So I downloaded the past few years of Robotics thesis proposals and dissertations. Then because I love statistics so much I ran some numbers.<\/p>\n
The average thesis proposal (in the RI department in the last 3 years, roughly) has a length of 48 pages, with a 17-80 page range and an average of 94 references. The average thesis dissertation has 165 pages, with a 90-364 page range and 89 references. The confusing thing here is thesis proposals have more references than dissertations. I’m not sure how that works except maybe students over cite during the proposal stage to make it look like they did a good job at their background\/related works sections.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, I know roughly the structure of a thesis proposal\/dissertation – now if only I had some idea what to actually put IN my thesis…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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