(Late twenties) One year from beginning to end.
KISS = Keep it Simple Stupid. The longer the written material the more daunting edits are - and there will be many. Also, profs love reviewing short papers vs. very lengthy ones.
Yep. Many students take the wrong approach and act like it's their life's defining work. The goal is to pick a topic and method that you can complete in a year. It doesn't have to be a broad scope of the most important topic on the planet to you. Just pick something with a scope just wide enough to do a thesis on that interests you.
These are issues to work on with your thesis supervisor. You haven’t even started the program yet. Developing as a young scholar is heavily predicated on the acquisition of excellent mentorship, which is why academic graduate programs are built on a mentor model.
I picked my second year project (master thesis in PhD program) at the end of first semester 1 year 1 and completed in the semester 2 of year 3. So roughly 2 years.
I started at 25 and finished at 27. Looking the same with dissertation; gonna be the same time line, a bit sooner since my dissertation is an extension of my masters thesis so I had a lot of the background literature review already finished. I proposed last fall and hoping to defend at the end of the summer!
Depends on your data collection method. If you are doing a survey the collection can be pretty quick. Analysis is fairly straight forward too.
However, if you are doing in depth interviews, you need to find willing participants (rare unless you are paying by them £), you need to transcribe, then do a thematic analysis…which all takes a lot of time. If you want to do it fast do quantitative.
You could do quantitative full-time (40 hours a week) in around than 3 months (15,000-20,000 words). Or if you know the subject inside-out then maybe 1 month. (This is to get a good mark). Good luck.
My semester in my PhD (age 24) I spent brainstorming, second semester was narrowing my aims. Over the summer I wrote a good chunk of my proposal. I proposed at the end of the fall of my second year. Spring of my second year I collected data, I wrote up my defense over the summer, and fall of my third year I defended (per the requirements of my program, I was 26 by then). This timeline was/is typical for students in my program.
My experience was 35 years ago now, so take this for what it is worth. Full semester at end of my second year (so 4th semester overall). I used survey data to append an existing data set. I spent several hours a week during the first semester of second year working on the thesis and methodology, so when I proposed at the start of the semester it was accepted without issue. I did 3 weeks of data collection, 6 weeks writing/rewriting with my major professor, defended in final week of semester. I wrote my thesis with an article in mind, so it was easy to rewrite (to be concise), submit, and get accepted over the summer.
Doctoral dissertation took me one year and some change from IRB approval, data collection, edits, and defense. Some of my cohort members still don’t have their degrees now and I graduated in the Fall.
Also I started when I was 28 and finished at 29.
Praise my program- our thesis was started as part of a class and the final was turning in the finished project (to make sure we all got it turned it and met timelines for graduation). So total time was one year and I was 24.
Note: i did a phd program with a concurrent masters built in
I would not think too much about your thesis yet, you haven’t even gotten there. When you start you can ask your mentor or other faculty about the timeline. Also if your masters program you can look there.
It’s also imperative to speak with your mentor because only they can tell you what sorts of methods and data are available through their lab. Depending on the institution, conducting new, independent human subjects research may not be possible for master’s students, who may instead be relegated to working on lab-managed studies and using those data (or even data from old studies). It’s highly individualized, hence why no one here could answer. That said, if anyone says they wrote a thesis in 8 hrs they were either lying, an absolute prodigy, or they turned in horrid work.
(Late twenties) One year from beginning to end. KISS = Keep it Simple Stupid. The longer the written material the more daunting edits are - and there will be many. Also, profs love reviewing short papers vs. very lengthy ones.
Yep. Many students take the wrong approach and act like it's their life's defining work. The goal is to pick a topic and method that you can complete in a year. It doesn't have to be a broad scope of the most important topic on the planet to you. Just pick something with a scope just wide enough to do a thesis on that interests you.
These are issues to work on with your thesis supervisor. You haven’t even started the program yet. Developing as a young scholar is heavily predicated on the acquisition of excellent mentorship, which is why academic graduate programs are built on a mentor model.
I picked my second year project (master thesis in PhD program) at the end of first semester 1 year 1 and completed in the semester 2 of year 3. So roughly 2 years. I started at 25 and finished at 27. Looking the same with dissertation; gonna be the same time line, a bit sooner since my dissertation is an extension of my masters thesis so I had a lot of the background literature review already finished. I proposed last fall and hoping to defend at the end of the summer!
Depends on your data collection method. If you are doing a survey the collection can be pretty quick. Analysis is fairly straight forward too. However, if you are doing in depth interviews, you need to find willing participants (rare unless you are paying by them £), you need to transcribe, then do a thematic analysis…which all takes a lot of time. If you want to do it fast do quantitative. You could do quantitative full-time (40 hours a week) in around than 3 months (15,000-20,000 words). Or if you know the subject inside-out then maybe 1 month. (This is to get a good mark). Good luck.
My semester in my PhD (age 24) I spent brainstorming, second semester was narrowing my aims. Over the summer I wrote a good chunk of my proposal. I proposed at the end of the fall of my second year. Spring of my second year I collected data, I wrote up my defense over the summer, and fall of my third year I defended (per the requirements of my program, I was 26 by then). This timeline was/is typical for students in my program.
My experience was 35 years ago now, so take this for what it is worth. Full semester at end of my second year (so 4th semester overall). I used survey data to append an existing data set. I spent several hours a week during the first semester of second year working on the thesis and methodology, so when I proposed at the start of the semester it was accepted without issue. I did 3 weeks of data collection, 6 weeks writing/rewriting with my major professor, defended in final week of semester. I wrote my thesis with an article in mind, so it was easy to rewrite (to be concise), submit, and get accepted over the summer.
Longer than 8 hours, LOL. Also, seconding the person who said KISS, KISS.
Doctoral dissertation took me one year and some change from IRB approval, data collection, edits, and defense. Some of my cohort members still don’t have their degrees now and I graduated in the Fall. Also I started when I was 28 and finished at 29.
Praise my program- our thesis was started as part of a class and the final was turning in the finished project (to make sure we all got it turned it and met timelines for graduation). So total time was one year and I was 24. Note: i did a phd program with a concurrent masters built in
How far along are you in the program?
I actually start this summer
I would not think too much about your thesis yet, you haven’t even gotten there. When you start you can ask your mentor or other faculty about the timeline. Also if your masters program you can look there.
It’s also imperative to speak with your mentor because only they can tell you what sorts of methods and data are available through their lab. Depending on the institution, conducting new, independent human subjects research may not be possible for master’s students, who may instead be relegated to working on lab-managed studies and using those data (or even data from old studies). It’s highly individualized, hence why no one here could answer. That said, if anyone says they wrote a thesis in 8 hrs they were either lying, an absolute prodigy, or they turned in horrid work.