How long do revisions to one's thesis usually take?

[Grashupfer]

I'm a masters student looking to defend in early May.  I would like to take a trip after I finish to destress before starting a job as my thesis has caused me some grief and I would like to visit my girlfriend.  As you can imagine it is better (cheaper) to book trips in advance.  What is a reasonable amount of time to factor in for revisions to one's thesis?

[Grashupfer]

Fyi, thesis should end up to be 20-30 pages text with 10-15 figures.

[TakeruK]

It totally depends on the level of revisions you get. I had minor revisions on my MSc thesis** (mostly just a few clarification questions) so it only took me a week to get everything submitted after the defense (the hardest part was properly filling out all the thesis submission forms, getting signatures and then delivering the darn thing to the right office at the right time!). However, it is possible that you will get major revisions that ask you to redo an entire chapter or something. You know your work well so you can judge whether or not you need to factor in extra time.

 

I was in your shoes in 2012. I was defending mid-August and my plan was to pack up my entire apartment to move to PhD school by the end of August. I gave myself ~10 days between defense and move date but only 1 working week, so I had to submit everything on the last business day before leaving the city! And I had to pack everything too! It was pretty stressful but it was manageable. If I were to do it again, I would probably give myself a few extra days--or at least leave on a Tuesday or Wednesday so that the final working day is not a Friday. 

 

Also, if you give yourself a few extra days, you have more time to celebrate with friends (if that's what you want to do) after your defense. But if you are in a hurry to get out and destress, then perhaps starting corrections the day after your defense is okay too!

 

And finally, it also really depends on what you need to start your job. For my PhD program, I didn't need to show proof of MSc completion until December so my backup plan was to finish up the corrections while in PhD city if they were major corrections (I would have to submit by Oct 1 to get my degree before December). If your job does not need proof of MS completion prior to starting, perhaps you can use the same backup plan too!

 

 

(**For comparison, my thesis was about 100 pages of text in the very space-wasteful double spaced large font format, which is the standard length for a Canadian thesis MSc.)

[GeoDUDE!]

I also was in a similar situation, I had to defend in June before my advisor left for field camp and then go on to a PhD program! 

 

My thesis ~10k words and ~20 figures was edited in 5 days because my advisor worked a lot to help me graduate fast, IE I sent him a copy, he sent me corrections, within a few hours ect. 

Edited February 17, 2015 by GeoDUDE!

[BiochemMom]

Holy crap. My thesis without citations was 72 pages, 14 of those figures. (Chemistry program...required 50 page minimum without counting citations for my school).

My advisor has my first draft now. He said I should be able to have it submitted to my whole committee within the month. So either he's got a lot of faith in my editing process or my own obsession with getting it perfect and spending two months revising before showing it to him helped.

I just want it done. I'm ready to defend and get out! Haha

Edit: 14 pages of figures because several were whole page NMR

Edited February 17, 2015 by BiochemMom

[rising_star]

It really depends on you (as in, how fast you are at revising/editing) and the level of revisions you're asked to make. I think I made my MA thesis revisions in a week, and it was just over 100 pages long.

[zenseeker]

I agree that the revision process depends on the individual, as well as on your advisor. If your advisor is generally good about returning revisions in a timely manner, then that will help you finish revising more quickly. Also, since your thesis is relatively short, hopefully that will make the process swifter. Have you already gone through earlier rounds of preliminary revisions on your thesis before submitting the final draft? If this is the first time that your advisor or other readers have seen most of your thesis before, that could mean that they will have more requests for revisions. I've found throughout the grad. school process that things generally take longer that I originally anticipate, so I suggest giving yourself a little more time (two weeks instead of one, for example) just to be safe.

 

I struggled with timing a lot myself when I got close to finishing. Surprisingly, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered that I didn't even know about until I got to that point in the program (like thesis formatting, filing dates, etc.). I found this blog article about the thesis completion process really helpful: http://editingworm.com/submitting-dissertation-need-know/

[Grashupfer]

Thanks for the posts!  In my situation there will be several drafts along the way so I think most of the kinks should be worked out.  I talked to my adviser about it and he said it should only take a few days if all goes according to plan.

[shadowclaw]

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I want everything to be submitted and done by the end of the semester, because I plan on taking a two month bird job about a week after graduation and I won't be in the position to be sending things back and forth. At the moment, I think I'm on track to defend my thesis in late March or early April, which gives me about a month after the defense to get the written component polished and submitted to the graduate office.

My main worry isn't that my advisor or committee will want major revisions during that window. It's that the graduate school will be a pain with formatting and will delay my submission of the final bound thesis. My advisor's previous grad student never actually received his degree because he had issues with the graduate school. Since he was heading to a PhD program that didn't care if he had his masters, once August rolled around and his thesis still wasn't approved, he basically said screw it and abandoned it.

Another complication is that the graduate coordinator has to sign off on my thesis and he's going out of the country in two weeks. He won't be back until June. He has assured me and the other students planning to graduate that the graduate school is fine with his signature being missing until he returns, but it still sits in the back of my mind.

[kotov]

Hopefully I'm heading a lot of this off at the pass by having my advisor kind of look stuff over as I get done with it (about halfway through now). Since I'm probably looking at ca. 250 pages for the finished product, I want to have as much of the editing preempted as I can.

[juilletmercredi]

My main worry isn't that my advisor or committee will want major revisions during that window. It's that the graduate school will be a pain with formatting and will delay my submission of the final bound thesis. My advisor's previous grad student never actually received his degree because he had issues with the graduate school. Since he was heading to a PhD program that didn't care if he had his masters, once August rolled around and his thesis still wasn't approved, he basically said screw it and abandoned it.

 

I was afraid of this too because I had heard horror stories of students going through endless rounds with the dissertation office, fixing minor formatting issues and page numbers, but it turned out to not be an issue. My dissertation was accepted like a day or two after I submitted it. If you follow the formatting instructions that the graduate school provides, you should be fine. If your school doesn't provide formatting instructions then they probably won't care. (And even if they do, these things are usually very minor that are easy to change - margins, font size, page numbers - so I can't imagine abandoning the submission of my thesis because the graduate school wants me to fix some formatting stuff, unless there were more substantial problems that we're not hearing about).

 

I don't remember how long the revisions to my master's essay took, but the minor revisions to my 130-page dissertation took me a month. However, I had also already started my postdoc and was working on some other projects at the time.

[pippapants]

Dude, I feel your pain. I defend TWO DAYS before my thesis is due to the graduate school because of my committee's schedules and the time crunch I'm under. I keep telling myself it'll be all right. They keep telling me it will be all right, but I am not so sure.

 

I'm hoping that when I submit my thesis to them a few weeks in advance, they will ask for revisions at that time. This whole thing has just been a disaster because my department changed its requirements on me and made me do a captstone last semester and a thesis this semester. I didn't finish collecting data until 2 weeks ago. I'm about 50 pages deep right now without tables, and I still my discussion to write. I need to revise my lit review, as well. And it needs to be done in two weeks.

 

FML.

Edited March 23, 2015 by pippapants

[Grashupfer]

Dude, I feel your pain. I defend TWO DAYS before my thesis is due to the graduate school because of my committee's schedules and the time crunch I'm under. I keep telling myself it'll be all right. They keep telling me it will be all right, but I am not so sure.

 

I'm hoping that when I submit my thesis to them a few weeks in advance, they will ask for revisions at that time. This whole thing has just been a disaster because my department changed its requirements on me and made me do a captstone last semester and a thesis this semester. I didn't finish collecting data until 2 weeks ago. I'm about 50 pages deep right now without tables, and I still my discussion to write. I need to revise my lit review, as well. And it needs to be done in two weeks.

 

FML.

Dang pippa, sounds rough.  I read another topic that you posted in and it seems like you have a rough deal.  Luckily my main adviser is being quite lenient and allowing me to defend in the fall if I wish (read if I can find an internship).  I too recently finished collecting data, and I'm unsure if I'll be done writing and drafting figures by May.

[kotov]

Looks like I'm going to have about three or four weeks between my defense and the deadline...gulp.

[rising_star]

kotov, that is *plenty* of time in my experience. You'll probably need fewer than 15-20 hours of actual time to make the revisions they ask for. Good luck!

[fuzzylogician]

I had 10 days between defending and filing, and I also used some of that time to pack up my entire apartment in order to move to a new job. I wouldn't say it was plenty of time, but it was enough. The one thing I'd recommend is reading up on the filing requirements ahead of time. There were some things that I could have done earlier on when I wasn't as busy that ended up being very time-consuming (like formatting the front matter, writing the acknowledgements, writing summaries/short abstracts, filling out official forms, etc).

[kotov]

kotov, that is *plenty* of time in my experience. You'll probably need fewer than 15-20 hours of actual time to make the revisions they ask for. Good luck!

 

Danke schön! I think I'll be alright, since I've kind of been getting my advisor's feedback chapter by chapter, and will probably do the same with one of the other professors on my committee, who's going to be coming for Germany for the defense. I think I should be okay. I doubt I'll be asked to revise too too much.

[kotov]

I had 10 days between defending and filing, and I also used some of that time to pack up my entire apartment in order to move to a new job. I wouldn't say it was plenty of time, but it was enough. The one thing I'd recommend is reading up on the filing requirements ahead of time. There were some things that I could have done earlier on when I wasn't as busy that ended up being very time-consuming (like formatting the front matter, writing the acknowledgements, writing summaries/short abstracts, filling out official forms, etc).

 

I'm kind of working on the formatting, etc. as I go along, and I've already got some of the front matter (abstract, etc.) done. I'm afraid I'm going to spend an entire week figuring out how to get the damn table of contents to look right, but other than that I should be ahead of the game there.

[rising_star]

The Table of Contents is pretty easy if you set it up right in MS Word. You want to use one of the "Heading" styles for all of your titles and subheadings within a chapter because then you can easily create a ToC that will automatically update page numbers if you have to change other stuff. That is actually one of those things that only takes an hour or so.