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Comment by croisillon | Hacker News Reader

My GF started working on her Master Thesis in 2011. A few things happened like moving to another city and some short jobs here and there. She was really dreading even thinking about it, constantly waiting for next year's updated statistics. Me trying to help also upset her, we were in a bad place in that respect. In 2015 she started going to a university help group but it still didn't really help. In 2016 I convinced her to pull the plug and it's been the best decision in years. Five years seem incredibly long for no result retrospectively, but what can one do.

Everything will be alright, take care.

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This is the thesis swamp.

A lot of the young people in these swamps are in a bad place.

The university I attended many years ago almost didn't have that swamp for Master's students. It was largely attributed to students working in small teams thus pulling each other through.

I learned about this when I attended an evaluation group with some of the high-ranking staff members on the faculty. At some universities, most people end up in the swamp and have for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, it's shameful, so people don't hear about it, and little changes.

If you work as staff at a university with a big swamp, the one single biggest contribution you can do to society is probably help fix the system at that university so people don't fall into the swamp. Even if it means putting your research on hold.

I never finished my 4th year Honours thesis. It was just a point in my life where so much was changing - moving out of home, getting my first full-time job, etc. I already had my Bachelor's degree and life just.... out-ran it I guess.

Looking back now I feel a little bad but I honestly don't regret it. You kind of look back a decade later (it's been much longer than that by now, but I realized this a long while ago) and it just seems insignificant, like a past life. It doesn't actually matter in a sense any more, nobody cares about my degree.

It was a wonderful, formative experience at the time and I don't for a second regret doing it. It's just that life moves on and people change over the years, ESPECIALLY if they started university as young adults. I actually think there should be a hard limit on the time you can spend doing a Masters given what I've heard about them. Or at least there should be more sanely-spaced deliverables. I was lucky in a way that Hons. was only one extra year on my degree, so there was no swamp to fall into at least. I wasn't going to pay for another year and by that time I didn't want to do it anymore.

Wow, some programs do give you a lot of time for your thesis!

as long as we paid the semester fee the university never bat an eye

Public universities usually give you a lot less time, think months, and one may also be constrained by visa allowances. Not sure if it's also the case in the US.

Not sure how is it with PhD, but with Masters and below, my experience (context: public universities, Poland) is that even in a public university you can get quite a bit of extra time if you... just ask for it. Preferably not in the last minute. The staff doesn't have any particularly strong reason to kick you out just for failing to meet a deadline, or even failing a class - the rules can be bent quite a lot if they see you're making an effort and want to complete your thesis / learn something.

Just as long as you don't hit an administrative blocker, that is. In my case, I never submitted the thesis, because my request to extend the time coincided with the faculty being split in two and completely overhauled - so instead of extension, I was told that, because of "syllabus changes", I would need to repeat the entire MSc level (2 years) to be able to submit the thesis now. I politely declined.

Mind boggling. I wrote my Masters thesis in one week. Mind you, it's computer science (I did some work on distributed systems and contributed to the Kubernetes container orchestrator), the professors don't stress that much on the writing as long as you did a valuable work. However, I also saw that as a waste of time, so I was just trying to get rid of it asap and write whatever. It's shocking when I hear people procrastinating for years for such a useless thing.

I started writing mine and got lost in it so thoroughly that I realized - about 8 years later - that it was a bit too ambitious.

The title made it simple Adaptive monitoring.

I worked in a small AI/ML company as an "SRE" (back then we haven't even heard of that acronym), so it seemed like a good fit. Just throw in some predictors, train it on the alerting data (when the oncall person just ignores it and the alert is not solved then it was a real false positive, right?) and so on. Also based on confidence scores decrease sampling rate for stuff that doesn't tend to break. Oh and also the local agent should pull the some pretrained predictors from the controller so it can locally switch to higher sampling if some patterns occur, this would catch those pesky hard to debug transient bugs/errors.

...

truth be told I got lost in chapter 1, because I had no idea what to actually write and implement from all this.

so no thesis, but years later I got a nice part of an ADHD diagnosis out of it!

Congratulations. Other people have other ways of allocating value to their work, of which the written thesis is a crucial component not external to it.

they're not wrong though and I also wrote mine in about a month but yeah, people are different

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