Engineering PhD student who died last year will get rare posthumous degree | Hacker News Reader

Engineering PhD student who died last year will get rare posthumous degree

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This is more common with undergrad degrees, I studied physics at the UW where my friend and lab partner died during finals week of his second to last quarter. I suspect that it is usually done quietly for the benefit of friends and family, and in his case it did give some comfort to people who knew him.

Miss ya Kyle.

Forgot to mention, this happened to be the other UW, University of Washington.

And well deserved it seems. I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must have been coping with such a disability at the graduate level, and at UW no less. You are an inspiration to us EE students, Craig!

I actually lived with Craig for two years (one before the accident and one after). He actually moved back in to the same college house the rest of us lived in. Caregivers came every day to help him. Really great guy and sad to hear of his passing. He absolutely deserves it!

As a second thought, the quality of the adaptive tech is really abysmal. Wheelchairs with that level of capability are at least $20k and have nowhere near the level of technology of your average economy car. Sad, really, with what I know we (tech minded folks) are capable of.

Cars have economy of scale that wheelchairs don't.

My friend was killed a year before he would have received his chemistry PhD. In that case, the university decided to grant it to him posthumously as well.

Good call UW! Honor the person, honor the dead. I salute this decision. RIP

Anyone have a link to his thesis? The research topic looks interesting .

In The Netherlands a university receives the bulk of the subsidy ( for the particular student ) when a student graduates.

on wisconsin, and great accomplishment to craig - doing that is no easy feat

To be fair once you've propsed a thesis your PhD is pretty much on autopilot. There's very little question he would have graduated.

The thesis project that I proposed, failed outright. It was quite ambitious, and was a sort of win-or-lose proposition. It took me 3 years to reach the point where it was evident that I wouldn't observe the signal needed to complete the work. My own abilities were doubtlessly a factor.

A lab mate of mine, who had already accepted a professorship at another university, gave me one of his start-up projects. By agreement, as I built the experiment, I sent him copies of my drawings, circuit diagrams, and source code, letting him reproduce my work almost concurrently.

That became my thesis, and the technical work became my ticket to industry.

Often, dissertations bear little resemblance to the proposed project.

As a counter point, my experience has been that once the thesis proposal is complete, the PhD graduation is practically guaranteed.

This fact is telling of the level of ambition and innovative thinking that is considered to be acceptable in students proposing their thesis. A "safe thesis" is good for the business of education not for the advancement of human knowledge. If they want safe thesis level work how about a "by reproduction" track so we still get "cheap PhDs" and we get an actual benefit to science?

You may be speaking across purposes, just because "thesis proposal" means different things in different places. In some institutions, it's a proposal for a whole thesis project, from experiment design through conducting experiments to drawing conclusions and writing up. In other institutions/countries, it's done as the project is drawing to a close, with experiments completed and data gathered: the candidate then proposes the thesis that this data supports, which they will write up and defend. The latter is more of a formality, because it happens at a different step in the process. The point where innovation and ambition incur risk has mostly passed by then.

In my case, the thesis proposal was at the beginning of an open ended and fairly long term project. You were supposed to conduct a literature review, show that the project had a good chance of working, and that you had a good enough grasp of the subject matter to handle the work. It was also a point where you could opt to finish with a Master's instead, having completed your coursework.

There was high attrition in between this step and getting the PhD.

The other end, where the student is basically done except for the writing, is less risky. One reason is that professors are strongly discouraged from letting a student fail a thesis. When I was ready to defend my thesis, I had to get permission from my committee to do so, and their signature indicated that they considered my work to be defensible. So the defense was in fact a formality. Failures at that point, that I know about, had to do with students getting caught fudging their work.

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