The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements
science.anu.edu.au
science.anu.edu.au
It begins with
> "First and foremost, I’d like to thank the nameless stranger that is responsible for enforcing the deadline for the submission of this thesis; but for their unwavering absolutism this thesis would exist in a perpetual state of being nearly done. The rest follows in no particular order"
And ends with
> "Finally, this thesis is dedicated to the memory of the two laptops that gave up their magic smoke in the name of science and this thesis. To my Dell Studio 1555 and Asus Zenbook UXA1:
> Do not go gentle into that goodnight
> Rage, rage against the dying of the backlight"
“I work best under pressure. In fact, I work only under pressure…”
« Whenever -due to economic necessity- Mastropiero was forced to compose music by request or commission, produced mediocre and inexpressive works. On the contrary, when he only obeyed his inspiration, he never wrote a note. »
"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.
I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."
Eh, its something you poured a fairly significant portion of your life into?
You best brag about it whenever you get the chance :P
I think concerning oneself too much about how things will be perceived in the future like that is a good way to kill off most honest self-expression.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/293779-take-it-from-me-ther...
"And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef...
https://x.com/CharityWoodrum/status/1808313627864440930
"For Woody and Jayson Thomas. From the local universe to the first galaxies, the brightest moments in space and time occurred during our brief epoch together. That light is unquenchable."
She had gone back to school as an adult to study physics, she was just finishing up her undergrad when her husband and child were swept away by a wave while walking on the beach.
She kept on with school and is about to finish her Ph.D. I just can't comprehend how. https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/ua-doctoral-candidate-in...
Edit: National Weather article on Sneaker Waves: https://www.weather.gov/safety/sneaker-waves
Apparently the cold water and other complications make things worse.
> Sneaker waves appear suddenly on a coastline and without warning; generally, it is not obvious that they are larger than other waves until they break and suddenly surge up a beach. A sneaker wave can occur following a period of 10 to 20 minutes of gentle, lapping waves. Upon arriving, a sneaker wave can surge more than 150 feet (50 m) beyond the foam line, rushing up a beach with great force.
> The force of a sneaker wave's surge and the large volume of water rushing far up a beach is enough to suddenly submerge people thigh- or waist-deep, knock them off their feet, and drag them into the ocean
But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.
We have edited recipes for length and for typographic consistency, but we've done a bad job of it. This is in part because we did much of the editing with a drink in one hand; if we hadn't it never would have gotten done. We hope that we've successfully retained the color and character you put into the recipe while making the finished cookbook look at least somewhat consistent rhoughout.
[0] I cannot begin to describe how much work this was. If you're reading this and thinking "how lovely", you've been warned.
I'm a 53 year old en_GB speaker and writer and long term owner of a copy of "Usage and abusage: A Guide to Good English" and long ago decided to boot the bloody thing into the long grass.
You and I (and every other interaction involving English) decide how English is spoken or written. At least Partridge uses the term "guide" for his treatise. There is no such thing as a pure English, finely polished and honed to a razor edge and delivered with equanimity. I think the best we can all hope for is to be mutually understood.
Given all that, I don't think I've ever heard of a "sentence fragment". It sounds like a grammar sin, probably funded by the lower circles of hell. I attended several very posh schools in the UK as well as the standard education system hereabouts and I don't recall that term being used. Perhaps I was asleep at the time.
I've done a quick search and this is dreadfully fluffy: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistake-of-the-month-sentence...
I'd love to hear what "sentence fragment" really means: to whom and why.
That is probably the better example of a perfectly good sentence fragment. There are many others in spoken English.
"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."
vs
"Often a sentence fragment is missing a verb (like this)."
We still have short sentences which seem to make sense without a verb. Is the following grammatically incorrect? "Hello there!"
Comment sections on the internets - and acknowledgements - are a bit milder on those grammar rules I'm sure.
That's an example of idiom. The word "what" is overloaded to mean "that is" - for dramatic emphasis.
The verb "to be" is often overloaded or implied in many languages. For example "quelle surprise" in French.
Perhaps we are dealing with a point of vocabulary. When I first learned Latin, we had "Civis Romanus" and "Mentor" as initial textbooks (kivvy was red and mental was blue). Later on a green book was added and it dealt with idiom (idia/idioms?) and I think that was its name, but I had moved on by then!
Its not a bad thing to be wrong, since, when it comes to expression, one can never be right. But it is still better to know the best way to be wrong, a wrong way that cannot be made right. And then you yourself will have created something entirely new.
... is bollocks! Yet, I can see a shimmering phantasm of "has" ... post sentence.
If you are going to create a thing, it needs to be consistent within the framework it tries to describe itself.
A "sentence fragment", whatever that is, needs to be grammatically correct (for a given value of correct) but not simply be a spelling mistake or just plain old bollocks.
I can punch holes into a piece of A4 and call the result "a paper fragment". There is no need to define a term for "paper, useless for printing on".
English is generally "SVO" but that is largely optional. There are no rules of grammar except for the rules of grammar that are in play at a particular time. No language is a lepidopterist's fantasy of a pinned downed beauty. Language is unconstrained and free to flap its fractal wings at will.
Your "sentence fragment" is simply grammatically incorrect. You seem to have accidentally morphed "misses" into "missing". To miss is a verb. Another possibility is you might have forgotten to deploy "is" prior to "missing". Again, that is simply a grammatical faux pas and not a weird language form.
In both cases your parenthesised, aside clause, is false - t'ain't so.
I'm also a en_gb speaker, and I'd never heard of the term until my teen years using the Microsoft Word grammar checker.
"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."
What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!
Similar constructions would be "A cucumber." "The house."
It's a fragment, not a complete sentence, because it lacks a predicate. Had GP included the word "goes" as discussed, it would've created a predicate.
> predicates are a necessary part of English sentence structure [0]
I'm absolutely certain that she loved it. I would've. That's too funny not to.
The stories of group fun strike me as the biggest delta vis TFA. And stories in general. Plus the tears. And the interesting slips - "... to thank my husband, <name of professor not husband, oops>".
The defenses were recorded, but distribution was usually limited. I've thought they might be great things to somehow share with younger students, contemplating college or graduate school. Being able to see people like themselves, coming out the other end. Having had a blast with friends along the way. There's a tension between intimacy and broadcast. Perhaps someday we can start scavenging older ones?
I so miss surfing defences and research talks. :/
I thought when I finished this dissertation I would feel great. As in large or
capable significantly above the average amount. Completing a project like this
over five years is not something I can attribute to my own abilities. Any
milestone is the sum of the individual decisions that led to it and when I
look at the amount of guidance, encouragement, patience, and downright goading
that it took to make the decisions that led to this point, I feel only gratitude.
> This work is dedicated to Orwell the dog. Orwell was a good dog and knew well the difference between zero, one, and many.
"To my loving wife,
who read this entire book,
apart from the math parts."
If anyone is interested. At Harvard, most Ph.D programs submit to DASH, meaning that you should be able to read any non-embargoed thesis from the past 10 or so years at https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4927603/browse?type=dateis...
They feel like they’ve been drafted a hundred times in the head of the author, but then put down on the page in a hurry, the clock ticking on their deadline.
Like, they’re trying to tell you the most important thing they’ve ever said - at the very moment the ship is pulling away from the dock.
A lovely read. I also have an affinity for dissertation acknowledgements and I think this entire piece really captures why they feel so special :)
Sex and conflict: How competition shapes reproduction, behaviour and life-histories in various animals (2022)”
Pretty funny juxtaposition of thesis title and acknowledgment.
I was very happy when I found a PhD thesis which made it different. It wrote, in french:
Acknowledgements
[the list of people]
find here my most severe gratitude.
That felt clear, honest and fitting. I copied that one.
Maybe that was one of the older styles mentioned in the articles.
(we joked about it, but there's a grain of truth to it. the chapters themselves were usually published long ago already and only people in your specific field would care about them anyways).
Definitely one of my favorite parts to read of any thesis are the acknowledgements. It’s often a time to lower the “fancy academic” mask and really see the human behind the writing; something essentially impossible with the dressed-up writing of many disciplines!
I believe the first part of my own acknowledgements began with: “There are only a few interesting things in this thesis. Out of all of them, this section might be the most important.”
To this day, this is still true!
[1] https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/videos/scientists-rea...
This is so spot on it hurts. The acknowledgements in my own thesis were drafted and re-drafted over and over in my head for months, and then written down the day before submission.
> But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh.
> Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait....[1]
> [1] The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
”To my surprise”
I've seen so many people just slink away from their PhD's, perhaps with a nominal masters, but always in some kind of defeat, without accepting or sorting out exactly why. That makes the experience dog them for a long time.
People leaving should write an announcement. There should be a public acknowledgement, perhaps walking the gauntlet of those staying who nonetheless applaud your decision.
We can't have venturing without a personally and socially positive way to manage venture failure and its aftermath.
I leave (of absence, technically) this program with a lightness of heart and exhilaration at the next adventure in joining the rabid commercial world of a tech startup. I would like to acknowledge a great debt to everyone who helped me grow in these 4 years. Know that I will be a faithful alum, of lesser degree.
I never made any sort of announcement when I left, and so had very little closure. Graduate school just ended and just trying to survive demanded my full attention in other areas. All I have left now is my unfinished dissertation, complete with the acknowledgement section I wrote.
It reads like a eulogy to a life I never had, to the shattered dreams I left behind, and to the naivete of my younger self. Perhaps there is some poetic value in there, but no one but myself will ever read it now. When it finally disappears it will, appropriately, be in a manner similar to how my failed PhD ended, with no one noticing and no one mourning its passing.
"...For all the experiments I’ve performed and the data I’ve collected, for none have I so unequivocally discovered truth as this: Love is eternal."
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/items/a0d83e35-0382-48b7-9183-c5aef...
>Who should I thank? My so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?
>My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.
>If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.
>Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.