{"id":7576,"date":"2019-10-03T10:18:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T21:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=7576"},"modified":"2021-03-25T15:11:11","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T02:11:11","slug":"throwback-thursday-when-to-let-your-thesis-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=7576","title":{"rendered":"Throwback Thursday: When to let your thesis go?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The actor\/director Sir Kenneth Branagh was asked in an interview<\/a>: how do you know a movie you\u2019re directing is finished? After a moment\u2019s pause he replied: you don\u2019t, you abandon it to the audience and they let you know if it\u2019s finished. The point he was making was that at some point you have to let go of it even if you know you could re-shoot some scenes, make more edits or add special sound effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we swap the multi-million dollar Hollywood movie for the thesis you have lovingly produced, directed and acted in, how do you know when it\u2019s ready to submit: do you abandon it to your examiners and hope for the best? The analogy of thesis and movie almost holds as you have movie critics (your examiners), the movie\u2019s paying public (your eventual thesis readers) plus studio executives (your supervisors). This post offers two business ideas to help you understand the dilemmas involved in deciding when it\u2019s time to let go of your thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard Becker\u2019s Writing for social scientists<\/em><\/a> has a lovely section in which Becker compares the academic writing endeavour to the tension within corporations between the new product development and marketing departments. The designers and engineers in product development want to create the perfect mousetrap, whereas the marketers want to get an already existing (but maybe not perfect) mousetrap out to market before competitors beat them to it. As thesis writers we\u2019re probably more in tune with the designers and engineers, trying to write the perfect copy but the marketing people have a point too. When will it be perfect? What happens if a rival corporation releases a product (thesis) that makes your work obsolete? We all know of Charles Darwin; fewer people know of Alfred Russell Wallace<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Becker\u2019s analogy has been updated for the start-up era. Tim Harford\u2019s Messy<\/a> discusses the phenomena of the MVP<\/a>, minimum viable product. Dropbox<\/a> is a prime example of an MVP technology in Harford\u2019s book; it was released quickly to market and early adopters helped fix its teething problems while larger software companies were perfecting similar technologies but were too late to launch: Dropbox had already cornered the market. Your thesis\u2019 early adopters are your examiners. They can spot any flaws in the thesis, giving you the opportunity to fix any \u2018bugs\u2019 before your final thesis copy is lodged with AUT\u2019s repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trick, of course, is to ensure your thesis is a robust MVP. How do you do this? Look at your thesis\u2019 examination criteria<\/a> in the PG Handbook. If you and your supervisors can say \u2018yes\u2019 to the criteria, then you are ready to abandon to your examiners knowing you have an MVP. In an ideal world, your examiners allow you to deposit a final thesis copy that is as good as it ever could be. My \u2018rule of thumb\u2019 is that the thesis submitted for examination should be 90-95% \u2018perfect\u2019, allowing your examiners to give it the extra polish before it\u2019s launched to your eventual audience: your thesis readers. If you can fix the thesis\u2019 \u2018bugs\u2019, minor corrections, in a day or two then you abandoned your thesis at the right time. Not too early, not too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The actor\/director Sir Kenneth Branagh was asked in an interview: how do you know a movie you’re directing is finished? After a moment’s pause he replied: you don’t, you abandon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25757,"featured_media":6741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,1],"tags":[43,136,41,78],"class_list":["post-7576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-throwback-thursday","category-category-5","tag-drafting","tag-examination","tag-submission","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/Letting-go.jpg?fit=434%2C340&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p83npQ-1Yc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/25757"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7576"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8673,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7576\/revisions\/8673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}