Starting your PhD

Creating a conceptual framework of your PhD thesis

An important phase at the outset of your PhD project is to plan the chapters that are going to be in it. Think about the contents of your PhD and commit as many thoughts and ideas as you can to paper. If you aren’t sure how to get started, then think about how to answer the following questions:

• What questions are you going to ask?

• What is your study system?

• How will you collect your data?

• What are the most important variables that you will measure?

• What techniques will you use?

• Do you have hypotheses?

All these ideas (and more) are going to be swirling around your mind at the beginning of your PhD and you’re going to need to commit them to paper, and doing this right now at the start is the best time. If you haven’t done so already, write them all down. If you can do a mind map or some kind of graphical representation, this will be good for you if it suits the way that your mind works. Otherwise, you can use a series of lists and bullet points, if that is more your style. The important point here is be able to move from a jumble of ideas and thoughts into a formal plan for your thesis.

A thesis typically has five data chapters that are presented in a linear fashion (book format), bookended by an introduction and conclusion. At the heart of each chapter is going to be a hypothesis, a question or a technique that the following chapters implement in order to get their results.

It may help you to use distinct colours and short titles (just a couple of words) for each chapter so that you can efficiently communicate them to your advisor, and use them as file names for the sections (don’t use “Chapter 1” as your chapter name!). You should then use these same colours and short titles in your thesis timeline (Gandtt diagram) used in your proposal.

Once you have some rough ideas for your thesis plan, discuss it with your advisor and get their opinion. Then map it out on a piece of paper. But, be warned, it probably won’t be anything simple or linear - it’s likely to be more complex that the one illustrated below. It should have a lot of links and arrows that join all of the chapters to each other in different ways. It may help to code these links so that it’s clear what they represent. For example, you may want to use one colour for data and another for techniques and results. Although the detail is important, remember that the conceptual thesis plan is supposed to give an overview of the way in which the thesis works. This means that you might need to remove some of the minutiae in order to provide a clearer overall picture that others can easily follow.