Departmental How To’s

Study! Review the material after every class. Redo the problems from class. Then move to homework, which are often just somewhat more complicated versions. Even so, it’s hard. There’s a lot of material and much of it is abstract and requires a lot of steps.  Ask for help, don’t be afraid to ask questions.. Go to office hours. Sometimes you have a basic misunderstanding that can be hard to diagnose until someone corrects you. Make sure you understand the ideas behind homework problems. A lot of tricks will repeat themselves. If you have time, you can look at old CWEs, but those may also include more advanced topics than you know. Be patient with yourself, and be persistent. Sometimes you’re tested on something you only learned a week ago. Be honest about what you don’t know and try to fix it.   Classes are difficult, but very quickly you’ll realize you’ve learned a lot.

1. If it is before you have taken your first year Spring finals, don’t worry about CWEs yet. Focus on what’s in front of you. You’ll have enough time to study for CWEs. This is hard advice to follow, but worrying about CWEs during the year won’t help you.
2. Choose 2 subjects where you think you can do well on the tests. You’ll have to spend a lot of time regardless, but if you’ve done better in certain subjects, you have a shorter hill to climb. If you enjoy studying one subject, that also makes it easier. Furthermore, if you like it, you may want to research that topic, and studying for CWEs will solidify your foundation in that area. For some people it’s an easy choice and for others it isn’t.
3. Rough schedule: Take a short break after the semester ends. Unwind for a week or 2 (or 3). Go outside. Explore the triangle. Then do high level review of topics for a month, look at notes/homework problems/tests, but don’t hesitate to use answer keys if you can’t see what to do quickly. Now is the time to relearn fast, not thoroughly. Since you’re learning the topics for the 2^nd or 3^rd time and you know later topics,  you may see some connective tissue between topics you didn’t pick up on before, making it easier to understand the why and how. Note the topics where you’re weak. Towards the end, if your professor has taught your class before, you can look at old CWEs, which are an excellent resource. It may help you understand what professors emphasize, and thus what to focus on. This may be less useful if your professor hasn’t taught before, as different professors have different hobbyhorses. Again, note where you’re weak based on those tests. Next month or so, focus on your weak areas, really learn those specific homework problems. Last few weeks: study old tests and homeworks, review what you don’t know, keep to a schedule. You’ll know what you don’t know by then, so you can work on it. You’ll also begin to recognize patterns from old tests which helps guide you. You won’t see that now, or for a while, but eventually, you’ll understand.
4. Ask friends for help on topics. Sometimes they have great tricks for understanding. Sometimes you’re just looking at things the wrong way. They can often straighten you out. We also run review sessions, but classmates can help a lot and they’re available all the time.
5. Keep a good agenda of things you want to work on and when. Sometimes you’ll have to spend less time than you’d want on certain topics, but it’s for the greater good.
6. Don’t study all one class then all another class. By the time you’re done with the second class, you’ll have forgotten the first. It’s normal to have to re-learn things a few different times. It’s a lot of complicated material.
7. The week before the test is the worst. Between the adrenaline and the relief, the tests themselves can be enjoyable.
8. Finals are probably harder than CWEs. It’s just really hard to pull things together when you literally just learned a lot of stuff and you had to do homeworks and you haven’t had time to integrate every piece into the greater whole. Thus, finals are probably harder than CWEs. It’s somewhat strange that we give people a few days to study for 3 finals but then give them 3 months to study for 4 CWEs. One way to understand it is finals force you to solidify your knowledge as best you can when the material is still fresh, but you can really fill in gaps and bolster the foundations of your understanding when studying for CWEs.

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Preferably by the end of third year, all PhD students are expected to writeup a thesis proposal and present their plans for their proposal in front of their thesis committee. Here we describe the goals of this part of the Phd program and then describe the procedure, followed by some practical advice.

Goals: The main goal of the thesis proposal and presentation is to writeup an initial plan for what you hope to accomplish for your thesis, including a literature review of the subject area, concrete problems you have started working on and progress on these problems if any and future work you hope to accomplish once you finish your current research. Note: You do NOT need to have completed research at this point, the main aim of this part of your PhD journey is for an independent committee to go through your planned work and discuss viability of the proposal and suggest any course corrections if need be. You then give a presentation based off this work to your committee for around an hour. Your committee will ask you questions about your proposal and try to understand the scope and viability of the proposed work.

Procedure:

1. Usually your advisor(s) will be able to judge when they think you have enough material for a thesis proposal. They will also suggest committee members. You need to have at least 5 members on the committee (including your advisor) and the majority of the members have to be from within the department.
2. Formal setup of the committee: After you have a plan for a committee, different faculty have different approaches. In some cases the advisor will directly contact the above prospective committee members to gauge their interest/availability. In other cases students talk to prospective members. Once this has been setup either the advisor or the student sends an email to the DGS with the list of the committee.
3. Time for the proposal presentation: Once the committee has been setup and you have discussed with your advisor on potential time frame for presenting your work to the committee, setup an initial meeting with your committee members to gauge availability times and dates. After this send out something like a doodle pool to your committee with potential 2 hour slots so you can reach a consensus time where you can present your work. Email your committee members about the time for the proposal.
4. Reservation of the room: Most talks are given in the conference room on the third floor of Hanes.   Talk with Alison Kieber to reserve the conference room on the third floor for the time slot you decided upon.
5. Thesis proposal: You then need to write a thesis proposal (consult with your advisors on the suggested structure content etc!).  We strongly suggest using the UNC thesis style file for Latex that can be found here (click on the link and navigate to Graduation folder): STOR grad documents
6. Sending the proposal to the committee: First talk with your committee members to see their expectations for when they would like to see your proposal. It is good form to give your members at least 3 weeks before the date of the proposal.
7. Proposal talk: You need to prepare a talk for your proposal (typically around 45 minutes but consult with your advisor!). Again based on the recommendation of the advisor, students give either board talks or a presentation via slides.
8. Forms: Talk with Christine Keat and get forms that need to be signed on the day of your proposal by the committee members.
9. A few days before the proposal: send a reminder email to your committee about the date and time of the proposal.
10. Day of the proposal:  At the time of the proposal, at the beginning the proposal the committee will ask you to step out for 5 minutes. Do NOT FREAK OUT! This is for the committee to quiz your advisor a little about the work in progress etc. After this you are asked to step back in and then you start your proposal. If all goes well then within 2 hours you will be a PhD candidate and move on to the next step of your career.

Advice:

The thesis proposal / preliminary oral examination is a time for you to form your thesis committee, write up your work up to that point and present it to your committee members. To a second or third-year student who is still relatively new to research, this can be a daunting task. However, if you develop a good routine and work ethic early on in your research, it is very achievable. Furthermore it can be highly advantageous to complete your preliminary oral exam as early as possible. Below are some more details about these two points.

Why would I want to do my thesis proposal earlier rather than later?

• Give yourself a deadline to write things up.
• Connect with committee members who might be able to provide different perspectives on the problems you are working on.
• Force yourself to think about the rest of your time as a PhD student from a high level.
• Get it out of the way, so that you can focus on research and your dissertation.

Specific tips on getting your thesis proposal early:

• Make a habit of writing your results down and compiling them into a single document.
  • Don’t worry too much about making it look nice. Most of what you produce will not be publication worthy anyway. This is just to have all of your work in one place.
• Regularly review the work that you’ve done and look for the “narrative”.
  • What questions have you asked? What things have you learned? What are natural questions that your results give rise to? How does your problem apply to existing problems? How can you put together some of these ideas into a compelling story, and what do you need to work on to complete that story?
• Related to the above, practice generating research questions.
  • They should be specific and related to your research. Think them through and try to foresee how a critic might respond to such a question. Use this to filter and evolve your questions. Bring the good ones to your advisor.
• Read often and hold yourself accountable for popular work in your field.
  • In your thesis proposal, you are expected to summarize the work that relates to your research. Furthermore, your committee may ask you about work that has been done.

Also, it is important to convince your advisor that you have a grasp on what has been done. This is a key indicator of readiness for the preliminary oral exam. This knowledge can only be gained through consistent reading and good questions.

Surprisingly enough, once you’ve gotten to that point, the work you did for your proposal should have you ready to take on the thesis. I guess someone designed this process thoughtfully.

If you go to this dropbox folder, under Graduation/PhD_Dissertation/Example_thesis you can find an article on good writing by Prof. Marron, and a few examples of nicely written theses. These examples were compiled by Shankar, so may be biased toward his interests. Leaving topic aside, these are well written in terms of organization, exposition and clarity. They represent examples that show a thesis can be a “great book” that is more than the sum of its parts. Each thesis is a result of a unique research journey, and as your thesis is your story,  your advisor is the best person to ask for advice about its structure, organization, etc.

Should include advice on finding ideas to write about, where and how to submit to a journal, and examples of  “good papers” and explaining what it is that makes them good.