The PhD Knowledge Base

The thesis you submit won’t look like the one you designed

Dr. Max Lempriere

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Your research will take you in directions that are hard to predict. New questions emerge, new insights lead to hunches, and pre-conceived ideas turn out to be false.

That’s just how research work.

The thing is, we go into our PhDs with research proposals that map out the entire project in one elegant plan.

If you’re anything like I was when I was doing my PhD, you get anxious about the fact that you research is deviating from this original research proposal.

I was worried that the thesis I submitted would look very little like the research I had proposed.

I had no need to be. That’s how research works, and it’s entirely natural for the finished text to be different.

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