Putting the Pieces Together

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the process of writing a cumulative PhD thesis.

This week, I worked for incredible two hours on my PhD thesis. The rest of the week was just filled with exams, marking projects and meetings. Despite the lack of time, I clearly saw one thing I was working on over the last years: the red thread that connects all my different papers. It was a great feeling to see that all my thoughts I put into writing the papers payed off and seem to result in a comprehensive analysis of my research topic. My advisors might think differently when they will read the thesis, but for me it all makes sense!

Overall, I am very fortunate as last year in December the regulations got adjusted and finally allow for a cumulative thesis. In this way, I „merely“ need to write a short text that provides an overview of my field of research and connects all the individual papers to one comprehensive thesis.

Thus far, I completed most of the overview – only one small segment is missing – and started to introduce and to connect the papers. Until this week, I was considering to put the papers into the appendix and to reference them in the main text that provides a summary of each paper. At the end of this week’s first hour of writing the thesis, a friend suggested that I might just embed the papers at the positions where I would normally summarize their contributions.

This sparked a lot of new ideas and resulted in me putting together the core part of the thesis within this week’s second hour. Of course, the introductions for each paper are not detailed enough, but it has reached a level that is easy to extend. Now, my thesis mainly lacks this one specific theoretical part and a comprehensive discussion of my results.

Personally, seeing my thoughts of how the individual research projects are connected to take shape in my text processing software was a very rewarding feeling. Suddenly, finishing the PhD seems doable and is only a few steps away. If I can free up enough time, my personal goal of completing the thesis by the end of the month of March is still feasible. Once the thesis is complete, I only have to go through the lengthy process of receiving feedback from my advisors to finally submit it…

It feels good to finally put the pieces together and I cannot wait to say farewell to this project!