[HN Gopher] The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements
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The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements
Author : zsrobinson
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-07-17 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (science.anu.edu.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (science.anu.edu.au)
| cratermoon wrote:
| The design is nicely done, too. I expected something very
| academic, this was interactive.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'd imagine there was a way to do this without completely
| hijacking scrolling between cards, though. Perhaps it was just
| loading additional content slowly due to HN traffic, but with
| the majority being text it should probably all be loaded up
| front anyway.
| navane wrote:
| I think it broke on my phone, perhaps as it lost interest,
| but that made the site a nice 1.0 experience.
| ethan801 wrote:
| I also often find myself reading the acknowledgments whenever I
| read a thesis (though I try to save it for the end as a reward
| for myself).
|
| 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...
| bzhang255 wrote:
| _Acknowledgements have a quality which is hard to describe.
|
| 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 :)
| mturk wrote:
| My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar,
| clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but
| after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end
| just before submitting it and finalizing it.
|
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?
| klooney wrote:
| The scheme shell acknowledgements really break up the monotony
|
| https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
| thefaux wrote:
| Even if meant as satire, I find these disturbing.
| a_e_k wrote:
| There's also the funding acknowledgement in the YOLO v3 tech
| report (https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf):
|
| > 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.
| markus92 wrote:
| At my faculty, we always "joked" that the acknowledgements were
| the most read section of any thesis. First thing everyone did
| when they got handed a new thesis was looking to see who was
| mentioned in the acknowledgements.
|
| (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).
| jimbokun wrote:
| "And thank you for picking up the slack with house chores
| whenever I was bogged down with lab work - I know I was the
| reason you bought that Roomba. Lauren Harrison
|
| Sex and conflict: How competition shapes reproduction, behaviour
| and life-histories in various animals (2022)"
|
| Pretty funny juxtaposition of thesis title and acknowledgment.
| dunham wrote:
| It's not a thesis, but one of my favorite acknowledgements is
| from Bob Atkey's paper on quantitative type theory (which assigns
| quantities of 0, 1, or o to types):
|
| > This work is dedicated to Orwell the dog. Orwell was a good dog
| and knew well the difference between zero, one, and many.
|
| https://bentnib.org/quantitative-type-theory.pdf
| mncharity wrote:
| I always looked forward to the acknowledgements at the end of
| thesis defenses, in biology at MIT and Harvard. Different fields
| have _very_ different defense cultures. Most have brief
| acknowledgements. Biology... had an art form. The audience is
| friends and family. Associated labs turn out in support. The
| format is tiled photo slides. I 've seen thanks to inspiring
| teachers, by name, from kindergarten to graduate. Pets, childhood
| and current. A stuffed animal. SO's and spouses. Children
| existing and pending. Family immediate and extended, alive and
| missed. Lab mates, friends, colleagues. And their assorted group
| adventures, road trips, and hijinks. Hobbies and communities.
| Staff, collaborators, advisors, committee. Brief tales of trials
| and tribulations, in research and in life.
|
| 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. :/
| jvanderbot wrote:
| My favorite paragraph I ever wrote was my acknowledgement
| intro: 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.
|
| I was definitely the black sheep in grad school though.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Greatness is measured in qaulity, not qauntity
| mncharity wrote:
| The "Scientists react to their PhD acknowledgements" video[1] at
| the bottom is brief (6 m) and sweet.
|
| [1] https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/videos/scientists-
| rea...
| LolWolf wrote:
| This is very cute :)
|
| 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!
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| But there wouldn't be the "human" without the mask...perhaps
| even humanity is a mask
| epaulson wrote:
| About two weeks I came across this tweet, from a PhD candidate
| just finishing up:
|
| 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...
| agubelu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Not to take away from these legit ones, but it surprises me that
| some of the recent plagiarism cases included people who
| plagiarized their acknowledgements. Like really?
| onli wrote:
| My PhD acknowledgements I found to be stressful. So much
| expectations for a few words, so many different ways of writing
| these. And how to know what tone was the right one for this
| occasion, in a university of a country still not my own, with a
| field not directly defined and thus not a clear influence even
| from there? Worse, the flowery style common in many of the thesis
| I saw just did not feel right, I wouldn't write like that ever.
|
| 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| For some reason, that made me weepy.
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