Thesis Development · Ecology, Evolution, And Environmental Biology
I gained specialized knowledge about my research area, honed writing and presentation skills, and learned more about what it is like to give and receive feedback to my colleagues in a scientific context.
This course helped me to refine my thesis ideas as well as improve on giving presentations.
Practical guidance re organizing academic presentations and writing, often given opportunistically. This was not the focus of the course, which swayed more towards incentivizing properly framing dissertation projects.
The purpose of this course is to give students a structured way to think about their thesis and put something tangible on paper as they prepare to move forward in the PhD program.
Read lots of papers, wrote a lot, & got a lot of feedback for thesis ideas!
To think, ask questions, to write to re-think, ask questions, to re-write Until the work is excellent
You have to take this class anyway, but if it was optional I'd tell you to take it and make it your top priority. You get out of this course what you put into it.
Overall, I think it's really good to have the space (& the requirement) to really start getting ideas down on paper and to practice presenting, and I liked hearing about my cohort's research! Also, Maria's feedback was very helpful. However, I think in the future the course could potentially be restructured in a way that could better serve student need (e.g., maybe a more collaborative / workshop type framework).
You will appreciate the journey at the end when you read how much of your ideas you have been able to take from your brain to a paper and receive adapted feedback that had helped improve the quality of your work. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2023 Course: EEEBGR6850_001_2023_3-THESISDEVELOPMENT : EEEBGR6850_001_2023_3 - THESIS DEVELOPMENT Instructor: Maria Uriarte