They’re like an explosion in a lab

July 17, 2024 4:01 PM

The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements A lovely multimedia essay from the Australian National University’s College of Science.

Bonus video! Watch as real scientists react to their PhD acknowledgments.

posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (8 comments total)

That was unexpectedly moving. It was exquisitely poignant to hear so many of my own thoughts and wishes from my own PhD thesis reflected in these other anonymous acknowledgements.

"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. ...

Many people find themselves lost for words at this critical moment.

It’s frustrating for scientists to not be able to accurately represent their data."
posted by Illusory contour at 5:30 PM on July 17 [10 favorites]

These are surprisingly beautiful, poetic. They reflect what I think would be the best of the humanity that we have, anywhere and everywhere. I thank the collector of these for some brief moments in the music of others' lives.
posted by paladin at 6:53 PM on July 17 [5 favorites]

Other than -moving house- I haven’t cracked open my copy of my dissertation since it got back from the MeFite who bound it many many years ago. Until now! It holds up. The gratitude, the in-jokes, the name-checking, some snark. Some names I ‘oh yeah’-ed, but the names that were most special then are still in my life now, more or less.

I do now want to go read the acknowledgements of people who finished after me and in whose pages I can expect to be named or referenced. That feels like work tho.
posted by janell at 9:38 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

thank you @Ten Cold Hot Dogs! this is so lovely. maybe a bit dusty in here…

No matter how impenetrable the thesis title, the project’s success always seems to come down to the same simple thing: other people.

posted by tamarack at 10:35 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure how I feel about it, many years later, but writing my master thesis coincided with me watching a lot of Arrested Development. So when I was at the end of this arduous process and finally wrote the acknowledgements, I could not help myself but to insert a joke from Arrested Development (episode 1x22) at the end:

"For the ease of the reader, I have changed all the gender-related pronouns— “he,” “she,”— to the masculine “he.” For [bigendian's girlfriend], my rock. I could not have done this without him.”

(The thesis itself then continued to make no use of the Generic he at all, because that's just dumb.)
posted by bigendian at 1:07 AM on July 18 [1 favorite]

Apart from - maybe - the title, the Acknowledgments are the only section of any thesis anyone will read after the book is bound. Mine were, and are, plodding and I apologise to myself and those cited.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:49 AM on July 18

I didn't expect to be hit by nostalgia for ANU today, but those scrolling images of Black Mountain Tower at sunset and the compactuses in the basement of the Menzies Library sure did it... my own PhD thesis is in one of those somewhere. I felt kinda sorry the author limited her search to science theses. Hey, there were all these social scientists just across the road in the Coombs Building—we can write wistful and flowery stuff too!

Of course, this prompted me to pull my own thesis off the shelf and see what I'd written all those (29) years ago...

"At times in the years since I began ... my thoughts and efforts roamed so far from my main field that I wondered if they would ever return. That they did is due to the support of those colleagues, friends and family members who make up the final essential ingredients in any doctoral recipe."

And if it's amusing deviations from disciplinary concerns you're after:

"I am determined to be the first doctoral candidate to thank the Mike Oldfield mailing list on the Internet ([e-mail]) for proving such an entertaining diversion."

From the main link here I was drawn to this story of a new tradition (an invented tradition, which is partly what my own PhD was about) at the Astronomy school at Mt Stromlo: The best words in the best order: why do our astronomy students burn their PhD thesis?

ANU's alumni magazines, newsletters and public-facing web articles are always interesting stuff—it's a great research university. I'm proud to have it as one of my alma maters, come to think of it.
posted by rory at 6:33 AM on July 18 [2 favorites]

Best acknowledgement of a PhD thesis advisor came from a candidate whose advisor was less than helpful, even problematic. How to be truthful yet tactful? Loosely (I work from memory):

"Only he and I will know how much he helped in the production of this thesis."
posted by BWA at 7:27 AM on July 18 [3 favorites]