Way To A Successful Completion of Your PhD Disseration

There are great opportunities available to those who are up to the task. In this article, we will discuss five guidelines to follow for the successful completion of your PhD.


Planning

As with any academic endeavor, whether it is from a simple essay to exams, you need to adequately plan everything. The same holds true for a PhD dissertation more than ever. You need to meticulously plan every aspect of your thesis, from the research to writing your references.

One aspect of composing a thesis, that many students struggle with is the fact that there is no set deadline; only a rough guideline for when your work is due. This means many students fall into a rut of procrastination and keep delaying their project.

One way to navigate this is by setting your own deadline. Not only that, but you should also have a set schedule and dates by which you expect to complete certain sections of your thesis.

The best way to plan is by roughly writing down what you aim to include in each section of your dissertation. This will give you a condensed version of your thesis that you can easily refer back to when writing.

Research

You need to conduct meticulous research for your PhD. You need to include a literature review in your thesis, which will bring your reader up to scratch of the important, and latest, literature pertaining to your subject.

The best way to do this is by looking at journals related to your topic. These will have the latest and past papers submitted regarding your topic. Another good source to utilize is your university’s library. Ask the librarian for good books about your topic, and the most popular ones. The reason for this is that many times it is hard to find the material included in publications online.

Writing Style

Your writing style is very important when composing your paper. Your writing should follow what is called ‘academic writing’. This means that your writing should be formal, and you should absolutely not use any informal language or colloquialisms.

A mistake many students make when writing their PhD is thinking that they need to use long and overly formal vocabulary. This is incorrect; your writing justneeds to be concise and easy to understand.

Structure

The structure of your dissertation should be as follows:

  • Abstract: This is a brief paragraph explaining what you will be discussing during the course of your PhD.
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction: This should be an outline of everything you will be talking about.
  • Literature Review: This brings your reader up to scratch with the important and latest research publications on your topic.
  • Methodology: Discusses and analyzes the methods you used to conduct your own research.
  • Findings: What conclusions your research led to
  • Conclusion: A summarization of everything you have discussed, particularly your main findings.
  • Bibliography: A reference of sources you have used.

Editing

You need to edit and proof read your thesis carefully. This is a very important aspect that many students, unfortunately, neglect. This is a vital step that you should not ignore. Aim to analyze each section separately and carefully.

These five guidelines are perhaps the most important in successfully compiling a good PhD dissertation.