Thesis Defense Stories

dukerdog wrote:

Professor: Two square blocks are sitting on the ground. They are identical in every way except that one is larger than the other.

That's inconsistent: does he mean that the blocks have the same density or the same mass?

There is a story: a student is giving his thesis defense at Princeton University. He has studied the class of Lipschitz functions where alpha > 1—why not study these too—he reasons. His thesis has many neat results, and he has proved that these functions are closed under many interesting operations. The story continues that a visiting professor raises his hand, during the talk, and asks:

Can you give me an example of any function in this class that is not constant?

The sad answer is no. End of talk, end of thesis. Hopefully, only an urban legend.

from

I had to write two theses for a Master's Degree in Architecture. I did a technical thesis rather than a design based option.

My thesis advisor refused to let my other two thesis committee members review my original 90 page thesis. He wanted me to write my thesis on a different topic. The advisor said I could write a thesis of the same length. In the end he would not approve it until the dang thing had grown to 280 pages.

My advisor said, now that I had done all the work all I needed to do was take 3 more classes and I could submit my Master's Thesis as a PhD Thesis.

My thesis defense was very easy. My three committee member knew me well and were quite easy to get them to all agree to I could publish the work.

I refused to complete the PhD program, mostly because I was really pissed off at the advisor. I still cannot believe I wrote some 370 pages of theses and all I got was a Master's Degree.

I defended my PhD dissertation in geosciences in 2007 and am now on a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA. I think the quoted text below is the best story/advice. Yes, be prepared to say, "I don't know," because your committee will push you to that point. But you also better put in the time and deeply prepare yourself for questions related to your research, _as well as_ your coursework. It's all fair game. I got grilled for three hours primarily by someone who subscribed to an alternate hypothesis, much as the person did below. It was tough and exhausting, but I came to appreciate it. As I've gone on in life, I've found that I can handle rough grilling after I give other talks without getting too flustered. That defense was a valuable experience to go through.In terms of not so great stories, my good friend broke down in tears during her defense and had to leave the room for 5 minutes to gather herself. She returned and handled the rest of the questions and ultimately passed. Hang in there, and make sure that your friends are waiting for you immediately after the defense with beers in hand :).

By the way, I thought my defense (qual exam, whatever) was a lot of fun. You're the most knowledgeable person in the room (or honestly you don't deserve to get your degree), and you get to talk about your research with people who are actually listening! It's great.

This was of course many years ago but I had a pedantic professor who sent my back my thesis for different reasons. One of the last times he sent it back with criticism regarding the use some of my statistics.

I really looked at his criticisms and didn't agree. I felt my work was very sound. I sent him back the exact same thesis. No change and with no comment about his criticisms.

It got accepted. I am glad I didn't try his crappy suggestions.

Dr.S wrote:

Best one I heard - from one of my colleagues who defended his PhD back in 1991.

Gets to defense and gets two slides into it. One of the committee members interrupts him abruptly and says, "Can we hurry this up? I have a golf "appointment" I have to get to." He then presses the button on the slide reader and holds it, to scroll through all the slides to the last one and goes "In conclusion..." and concludes - skipping the entire meat of the presentation.

Something like a 3-4 minute defense. The guy is a top quality researcher, he just had a really, really easy defense.

Mine included a similar, but lesser, version of the story above (MS Biology, 1988). The prof I was most worried about, the stats guy, began his introductory remarks with, "I need to be out of here by [less than 30 minutes from now], or I'll catch real $h!+ from my wife." After that, my advisor, an old and old-school type, had a hard time keeping the proceedings as difficult as he wanted.

I got through mine successfully. I was trying to stop myself from trembling the whole time. My muscles were sore afterwards. For the last 30 minutes of my defense, my supervisor was really cold. He was asking me about where I'm going in life, and to give him examples of how I will apply my research in the outside world. Prior to me finishing my thesis, he did here me talking about money, and how I wanted to be rich. He didn't say anything at the time, but brought it up in our final conversation. He thought that I was just doing the PhD for the sake of making myself look clever, as a way of making money. A lot of his questions were on my opinions of various research topics(not just the ones specifically related to my PhD, but things other people were doing). He didn't like me, but he thought I was clever. I haven't been back to Oklahoma since that exact day.