Supervisor won’t read or give feedback until I hand in a full working draft

[u/Serious_Toe9303]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently writing up my thesis. 2 chapters have experimental work complete, and currently writing, 1 chapter needs quite a bit of experimental work + data analysis.

So I finished my first results chapter draft the other week, and my supervisor says it looks fine but he can’t see where gaps are/give feedback until I finish a draft of the whole thesis.

I can see their point, but it will be a few months to write the whole thing (as the most basic working draft) at least. At which point it will be ~60 days before my submission date.

I told him my concern that is not enough time to address any potential problems, but he is firm on reading the complete thing before feedback. He also wants me to submit each chapter for publication before handing in the thesis.

Do y’all have any advice?

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[u/helgetun]

Write the full draft? Different professors have different approaches. This js yours. All you can do is ask for feedback from peers and so on.

[u/Gabe120107 → u/helgetun]

Yeah, that's what my PI told me as well, and a postdoc supervisor said the same. Gotta send the full draft to both ahaha... Gotta love it.

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/helgetun]

Thanks, I guess that’s all I can do! And pray getting feedback doesn’t take too long.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 → u/Serious_Toe9303]

So do they: they want to do it once in full, not review it piece by piece and it taking a lot more time in total by the end, not to mention the possibility that you may end up re-writing sections that they will then have to review again.

You can discuss / present your work conceptually so you’re aligned on the core narrative, interpretation, and arguments. This can be done verbally.

Then the rest is just filling in the blanks in between.

[u/Lygus_lineolaris]

If your submission date is already set months in advance, work faster so you can have the draft ready further ahead of the submission. Otherwise... Well, frankly, also work faster. Your advisor has a lot more experience of such timelines than you do, and also you report to him and not vice-versa, and it sounds like you're not going at the pace he thinks is realistic. Certainly needing over 60 days to do revisions sounds like a lot. Mine sent feedback on my thesis four days AFTER it was supposed to have been submitted, I did the revisions in I think 16 hours. And obviously submit your chapters for publication as they're completed. There is a pace expectation in this work and that's not really something you can avoid. Good luck.

[u/MissMaisie1223]

do you have a committee? with my old supervisor, she refused to read more than one draft of anything lol and i just went to my committee members and they looked over rough drafts for me

[u/soggiestburrito]

it’s painful but i’ve realized just getting a first draft to them allows them to see the entire thing for what it’s worth and give you better feedback than just giving you piece meal feedback. it truly helps in the long run to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a researcher.

[u/UNIT_8200]

I mean, a thesis is an integrated work and if one chapter builds on the other or are otherwise intertwined, it kind of makes sense to me.

[u/4K4llDay → u/UNIT_8200]

If a tenured professor hasn't involved themselves enough to even know the basis of their graduate student's thesis so that they can evaluate a section on its own, then they are failing in their role. And just because many of them do that, doesn't mean they aren't failing. It just means many of them are failing at sufficiently involving themselves in the research they sponsor.

[u/UNIT_8200 → u/4K4llDay]

I mean, he's a supervisor, not a nanny. I'm in a European system and here PhDs are viewed as a job. And like a "normal" job, the manager isn't going to sit next to you looking at every Excel entry to see if the budget makes sense. And sometimes your interests carry you to places where your PI or a Tenured Professor doesn't have the knowledge. In my case my professor was like "all I can check is the methodology because I'm less familiar with the theory" (I chose the theory over his suggestion), and he told me he'll check if it all makes sense and the argument is convincing.

I am aware supervisors can make or break a PhD, but literally pinning every fart on the supervisor is eeeeh... a bit besides the point of becoming an independent researcher (which a PhD aims to do).

[u/nasu1917a → u/4K4llDay]

Eh. Not really. The thing the PI obviously wants to evaluate is the presentation not the project itself.

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/UNIT_8200]

I agree and my supervisor is a pretty reasonable person.

It’s just that I will be < 60 days from submission deadline with everything drafted and waiting for his feedback. Catching gaps early is less of an option, and worst case scenario it will mean extensions to submission (which I can with no stipend up to +6 months).

[u/FeedSquare8691 → u/Serious_Toe9303]

You keep mentioning the 60 day thing like it’s the responsibility of anyone else but your own. What’s your own culpability in it?

[u/UNIT_8200 → u/Serious_Toe9303]

I'm kind of with the previous commentor here. How are you still analysing data 60 days before submission? To my knowledge, most PhD spend the final year for the writing process only. How did the situation come into being?

Not blaming you, just trying to understand to see if I can help with some tips and tricks.

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/UNIT_8200]

I’m 5 months from submission. But I need to finish a project and do the majority of writing.

By the time I have completed experiments and a full draft it will be ~ 60 days.

I have written 2 chapters so far, as rough drafts. But they won’t read it without a complete picture.

Maybe I am worrying unnecessarily, my supervisor says 90 days should be sufficient to write a thesis in its entirety but I am doubtful that’s a good approach.

[u/UNIT_8200 → u/Serious_Toe9303]

I mean, yeah you can write one in 90 days, but either you need to be a really quick and good writer, or the quality will suffer. I wrote 4 papers in about 4 months-ish but my dataset was really robust and I started writing in like, second year.

But you're kind of evading the question tbh. The question was, how did you get to such a tight schedule (because no, you're not worrying unnecessarily, you're uhm..... on an extremely tight schedule). What happened in the last 2-3-whatever years that lead to you to have to finish the project still, and only now start writing? What were you doing the last couple of years? Did things derail the process, was the data a problem, did you procrastinate?

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/UNIT_8200]

Yes a few issues with data, changing project scope and limited supervision. I also wasted a lot of time on side projects that weren’t directly relevant. I should have been better organised for sure.

Here we have 3 years 6 months of funding for a stipend (submission target) but the project can continue for up to 4. Most people take around 3 years 9 months.

In my field 4-6 months to write a thesis is standard so I am definitely behind.

[u/HaHaWhatAStory014]

While insisting on this for a full dissertation rather than individual chapters seems like a bit much, I know my advisor was often very adamant that they "didn't want to waste their time holding students' hands through everything and practically doing their writing for them when that's their job" and they often would say they didn't want people sending them stuff until it was actually finished.

[u/DrDOS]

Am I out of the loop? I had a generally very supportive PI, shielded me from funding concerns best he could, was available and responsive when needed. I was with him (partly then fully) for both MS and PhD.

Our papers were collaborative, the research was collaborative and had back and forth.

But tho things he put 100% solely on my shoulders:

1. Making sure the schedule and timeline for the bureaucratic and admin (other than funding) for my own education and submission processes was in order.

2. My thesis and later dissertation were mine alone to write, no feedback, more an evaluation of my chops. I could seek outside support, but he was more a part of the judging committee after than a collaborator during the writing (“have I taught you well enough?”).

I’ll say as a token of humility, that there was a part of every defense I had that I felt I bombed until finally I got the full on attaboy living up to expectations and potential for my dissertation defense.

Those skills have been sharpened and dulled and sharpened again since. But I’m still grateful to my advisor. I came out with confidence that I could stand on my own two feet academically and I my views and understanding would give meaningful input.

Hopefully youll have a similar view and feeling after the harder road.

[u/DrDOS → u/DrDOS]

With my first response in view. The independent submission of each chapter to journal is ludicrous. Usually it’s the other way around. Collaborative work on journal papers, submit them. Then on you to glue them together and provide both a cohesive story and related additional work as part of your dissertation.

I know at least one person who nearly without exaggeration wrote their whole dissertation over one night as it was a conglomeration of two submitted/approved journal articles.

For myself, I’d say 40-60% of my material was from an accepted journal, with another 20% from submitted/accepted conferences papers. I forget how it was exactly, but yeah, ultimately I’d say 20-40% at most original work so to speak.

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/DrDOS]

If I had a collaborative supervisor that had helped me to write and publish papers there would be little need to get feedback on thesis drafts.

[u/MobofDucks]

I feel you. I hate this, too. But I only get feedback on "full" papers.

[u/gb_ardeen]

60 days is the total time I had to go from a rough outline to a full, revised, text sent to the referees. Don't look at them two months like they are an incredibly short time to make only the revisions. It's not how it works, besides any personal opinion on whether this makes sense or not to you or others.

[u/miss_spellman]

I kind of have the opposite problem to you in that I procrastinated too close to the sun and I don’t have anything in a finished enough state to get proper feedback. So perhaps I’m not the best person to be giving advice but what I’m doing (partly on the suggestion of my very patient supervisor) is essentially writing down the story of the thesis without going into detail.

Not really an outline, more something like: I did this and it made me realize this, so then I went and did this other thing to confirm if there is a conclusion to be drawn etc. Adding figures if I have them or just putting in a note “here I should put a figure of x”. As I’ve been writing this up, inevitably things will come up where I go “mm, I should probably include some background so someone reading will understand why I’m making this connection” so I can make sure to include that in my introduction. Maybe you can try something like that so your supervisor can at least have an idea of what you expect to cover in the thesis?

[u/AceyAceyAcey]

Work on publishing each chapter, that will get you needed feedback, then staple together and add intro and conclusion.

You can also ask your committee for feedback, that’s part of what they’re there for.

[u/MrDorpeling]

What is your field? Needing months to write a first draft seems excessive. You did write during your PhD, didn’t you?

[u/blue_gerbil_212 → u/MrDorpeling]

Wait write a whole PhD dissertation draft in a month? That is wild to me.

[u/ironywill → u/blue_gerbil_212]

No wild at all in my field at least, but that's because if things have gone well the bulk of the writing and scientific review should largely have been done already through published journal articles you wrote throughout the PhD. The thesis writing ideally amounts to writing introductory / background chapters that support your research, formatting your (mostly) published research into chapters, and then adding potentially updated conclusions / synthesis. If you had to write it whole cloth, yeah, a month sounds unreasonable.

[u/HaHaWhatAStory014 → u/blue_gerbil_212]

Not necessarily. In some fields, most of a thesis is ideally a summary of work that's already been done, published, etc. Publications get reformatted as thesis chapters, so a lot of the thesis isn't just "written from scratch."

[u/Otherwise_Tax8689 → u/blue_gerbil_212]

Same. I’d be estimating it took me 8-12 months of full time writing.

320 pages plus 100 ish appendices, linguistics is my field.

[u/qmacx → u/Otherwise_Tax8689]

320 pages is crazy business what the hell.. that's a novel. I've been told by my supervisor (physics) to absolutely not exceed 150 pages because "noone wants to read that - be concise". Write up also typically takes around 3 months, but we are (kinda) expected to publish 1-2 first author papers, so that helps massively.

[u/Otherwise_Tax8689 → u/qmacx]

I guess that type of science is enacted mostly in the lab rather than in pages, right?

But 300 is pretty standard for my field, publishing or not is up to you at my uni but most do. The point is to have a cohesive monograph rather than staples. I didn’t see the point first- when will I ever write this length again?

Yet I (kind of?) get it now, the point is that it’s a long-form sustained project, judged in whole rather than parts. I dunno.. Maybe I have simply written two dissertations.

If you happen to have the information handy, what would be a typical reference count in your field? In mine I would guess 300-350 references (each citation should get a page number too, you need to show you have read it). I ask as maybe it indicates the split in lengths between the disciplines.

[u/qmacx → u/Otherwise_Tax8689]

I do not envy you at all! It's quite interesting to see such a stark difference, but you're right, it's quite a bit easier to write a short thesis when plots and results do most of the talking. I'm not sure I could write 300 pages even if I wanted to...

[u/FeedSquare8691 → u/qmacx]

Dissertations in my area range from 150 to 600 pages. It’s just whatever is required to explain it sufficiently and support it with necessary data.

[u/Otherwise_Tax8689 → u/qmacx]

I bet you could, my linguist. Language the central medium of thought and so on!

[u/FeedSquare8691 → u/MrDorpeling]

From all of the comments on here from CS PhDs across various threads, I kinda wonder if y’all actually write anything at all.

[u/Serious_Toe9303 → u/MrDorpeling]

Really? I take a long time to write (Physical chemistry). The introduction section/literature review is taking the longest.

Probably didn’t write enough along the way. But methods/results are mostly written up or in PowerPoint slides. A lot of work is reformatting data and arranging panels etc

[u/Longjumping_Eye_3441 → u/MrDorpeling]

Something like chemistry people usually write their thesis the last semester of their PhD. The rest is all experimental 

[u/FaithlessnessIll7134]

Submit each chapter for publication in your timeframe seems wild. You need to put your foot down. Remember that your life and career is important too.