unsw phd thesis examination

Log into

On your Home tab go to the left-hand side channel, For Research Students, and click on Thesis Examination Management. From there you can access all thesis submission and examination functions. 

Log into

Go to the Academic Admin tab. In the Student & Academic Admin channel on the left, click on Thesis Examination Management.  This takes you to a list of the students whom you currently supervise.

You can also include students who have already satisfied the requirements for their degree by clicking in the checkbox marked 'Include students that have already completed their degree' and clicking the 'Refresh' button.

Click on the 'Select' button next to the student's details.

Go to the Academic Admin tab.  In the Student & Academic Admin channel on the left, click on Thesis Examination Management.  You have 2 options:
- Choose Student Thesis Management (see below) to carry out tasks related to a specific student, including the nomination of a set of examiners for that student.
- Choose Examiner Management (see below) to find an examiner and carry out tasks which relate to that examiner alone.

Use the selection criteria to narrow down your search. Every time you change the search criteria, click the 'Refresh' button to bring up a new list.

The default display is all current students.  You can include students who have satisfied requirements for their degree or restrict the search to students who have already submitted their thesis. Please note that this will only return students who have submitted their thesis since the Thesis Examination Management system came online.

Log into

Go to the Academic Admin tab.  In the Student & Academic Admin channel on the left, click on Thesis Examination Management. You have 2 options:

- Choose Student Thesis Management (see below) to carry out tasks related to a specific student, including the nomination of a set of examiners for that student.

- Choose Examiner Management (see below) to find an examiner and carry out tasks which relate to that examiner alone.

Click on the 'Select' button next to the student's details.

Log into

Go to the Academic Admin tab.  In the Student & Academic Admin channel on the left, click on Thesis Examination Management. You have 2 options:

- Choose Student Thesis Management (see below) to carry out tasks related to a specific student, including the nomination of a set of examiners for that student.

- Choose Examiner Management (see below) to find an examiner and carry out tasks which relate to that examiner alone.

Click on the 'Select' button next to the student's details.

How do you make an outline of a chapter? For most of them, you might try the method that I use for writing papers, and which I learned from my thesis adviser (Stjepan Marcelja): Assemble all the figures that you will use in it and put them in the order that you would use if you were going to explain to someone what they all meant. You might as well rehearse explaining it to someone else – after all you will probably give several talks based on your thesis work. Once you have found the most logical order, note down the key words of your explanation. These key words provide a skeleton for much of your chapter outline.

Once you have an outline, discuss it with your adviser. This step is important: s/he will have useful suggestions, but it also serves notice that s/he can expect a steady flow of chapter drafts that will make high priority demands on his/her time. Once you and your adviser have agreed on a logical structure, s/he will need a copy of this outline for reference when reading the chapters which you will probably present out of order. If you have a co-adviser, discuss the outline with him/her as well, and present all chapters to both advisers for comments.

(depending on the reliability of your computer and the age of your memory). Do not keep a back-up drive close to the computer in case the hypothetical thief who fancies your computer decides that s/he could use the drive as well.

If you thesis file is not too large, a simple way of making a remote back-up is to send it as an email attachment to a consenting email correspondent; you could also send it to yourself. In either case, be careful to dispose of superseded versions so that you don't waste disk space, especially if you have bitmap images or other large files. Or you could use a drop-box or other more sophisticated system.

You should also have a physical filing system: a collection of folders with chapter numbers on them. This will make you feel good about getting started and also help clean up your desk. Your files will contain not just the plots of results and pages of calculations, but all sorts of old notes, references, calibration curves, suppliers' addresses, specifications, speculations, notes from colleagues etc., which will suddenly strike you as relevant to one chapter or other. Stick them in that folder. Then put all the folders in a box or a filing cabinet. As you write bits and pieces of text, place the hard copy, the figures etc in these folders as well. Touch them and feel their thickness from time to time – ah, the thesis is taking shape.

If any of your data exist only on paper, copy them and keep the copy in a different location. Consider making a copy of your lab book. This has another purpose beyond security: usually the lab book stays in the lab, but you may want a copy for your own future use. Further, scientific ethics require you to keep lab books and original data for at least ten years, and a copy is more likely to be found if two copies exist.

If you haven't already done so, you should archive your electronic data, in an appropriate format. Spreadsheet and word processor files are not suitable for long term storage. by Joseph Slater is a good guide.

While you are getting organised, you should deal with any university paperwork. Examiners have to be nominated and they have to agree to serve. Various forms are required by your department and by the university administration. Make sure that the rate limiting step is your production of the thesis, and not some minor bureaucratic problem.

You may want to make your timetable into a chart with items that you can check off as you have finished them. This is particularly useful towards the end of the thesis when you find there will be quite a few loose ends here and there.

Your adviser will expect to read each chapter in draft form. S/he will then return it to you with suggestions and comments. Your adviser will want your thesis to be as good as possible, because his/her reputation as well as yours is affected. Scientific writing is a difficult art, and it takes a while to learn. As a consequence, there will be many ways in which your first draft can be improved. So take a positive attitude to all the scribbles with which your adviser decorates your text: each comment tells you a way in which you can make your thesis better.

As you write your thesis, your scientific writing is almost certain to improve. Even for native speakers of English who write very well in other styles, one notices an enormous improvement in the first drafts from the first to the last chapter written. The process of writing the thesis is like a course in scientific writing, and in that sense each chapter is like an assignment in which you are taught, but not assessed. Remember, only the final draft is assessed: the more comments your adviser adds to first or second draft, the better.

Before you submit a draft to your adviser, run a spell check so that s/he does not waste time on those. If you have any characteristic grammatical failings, check for them.

Obviously your examiners will read the thesis. They will be experts in the general field of your thesis but, on the exact topic of your thesis, you are the world expert. Keep this in mind: you should write to make the topic clear to a reader who has not spent most of the last three years thinking about it.

Your thesis will also be used as a scientific report and consulted by future workers in your laboratory who will want to know, in detail, what you did. Theses are also consulted by people from other institutions, and the library at your university will store a copy as a file on a server. The advantage is that your thesis can be consulted much more easily by researchers around the world. (See e.g. for the digital availability of research theses.) Write with these possibilities in mind.

It is often helpful to have someone other than your adviser(s) read some sections of the thesis, particularly the introduction and conclusion chapters. It may also be appropriate to ask other members of staff to read some sections of the thesis which they may find relevant or of interest, as they may be able to make valuable contributions. In either case, only give them revised versions, so that they do not waste time correcting your grammar, spelling, poor construction or presentation.

If you are writing in the passive voice, you must be more careful about attribution than if you are writing in the active voice. "The sample was prepared by heating yttrium..." does not make it clear whether you did this or whether Acme Yttrium did it. "I prepared the sample..." is clear.

Short, simple phrases and words are often better than long ones. Some politicians use "at this point in time" instead of "now" precisely because it takes longer to convey the same meaning. They do not care about elegance or efficient communication. You should. On the other hand, there will be times when you need a complicated sentence because the idea is complicated. If your primary statement requires several qualifications, each of these may need a subordinate clause: "When [qualification], and where [proviso], and if [condition] then [statement]". Some lengthy technical words will also be necessary in many theses, particularly in fields like biochemistry. Do not sacrifice accuracy for the sake of brevity. "Black is white" is simple and catchy. An advertising copy writer would love it. "Objects of very different albedo may be illuminated differently so as to produce similar reflected spectra" is longer and uses less common words, but, compared to the former example, it has the advantage of being true. The longer example would be fine in a physics thesis because English speaking physicists will not have trouble with the words. (A physicist who did not know all of those words would probably be glad to remedy the lacuna either from the context or by consulting a dictionary.)

Sometimes it is easier to present information and arguments as a series of numbered points, rather than as one or more long and awkward paragraphs. A list of points is usually easier to write. You should be careful not to use this presentation too much: your thesis must be a connected, convincing argument, not just a list of facts and observations.

One important stylistic choice is between the active voice and passive voice. The active voice ("I measured the frequency...") is simpler, and it makes clear what you did and what was done by others. The passive voice ("The frequency was measured...") makes it easier to write ungrammatical or awkward sentences. If you use the passive voice, be especially wary of dangling participles. For example, the sentence "After considering all of these possible materials, plutonium was selected" implicitly attributes consciousness to plutonium. This choice is a question of taste: I prefer the active because it is clearer, more logical and makes attribution simple. The only arguments I have ever heard for avoiding the active voice in a thesis are (i) many theses are written in the passive voice, and (ii) some very polite people find the use of "I" immodest. Use the first person singular, not plural, when reporting work that you did yourself: the editorial 'we' may suggest that you had help beyond that listed in your acknowledgments, or it may suggest that you are trying to share any blame. On the other hand, retain plural verbs for "data": "data" is the plural of "datum", and lots of scientists like to preserve the distinction. Just say to yourself "one datum is ..", "these data are.." several times. An excellent and widely used reference for English grammar and style is by H.W. Fowler.

In many cases, a reasonably neat diagram can be drawn by hand faster than with a graphics package, and you can scan it if you want an electronic version. Either is usually satisfactory. A one bit (i.e. black and white), moderate resolution scan of a hand-drawn sketch will be bigger than a line drawing generated on a graphics package, but not huge. While talking about the size of files, we should mention that photographs look pretty but take up a lot of memory. There's another important difference, too. The photographer thought about the camera angle and the focus etc. The person who drew the schematic diagram thought about what components ought to be depicted and the way in which the components of the system interacted with each other. So the numerically small information content of the line drawing may be much more useful information than that in a photograph.

Another note about figures and photographs. In the digital version of your thesis, do not save ordinary photographs or other illustrations as bitmaps, because these take up a lot of memory and are therefore very slow to transfer. Nearly all graphics packages allow you to save in compressed format as .jpg (for photos) or .gif (for diagrams) files. Further, you can save space/speed things up by reducing the number of colours. In vector graphics (as used for drawings), compression is usually unnecessary.

In general, students spend too much time on diagrams – time that could have been spent on examining the arguments, making the explanations clearer, thinking more about the significance and checking for errors in the algebra. The reason, of course, is that drawing is easier than thinking.

I do not think that there is a strong correlation (either way) between length and quality. There is no need to leave big gaps to make the thesis thicker. Readers will not appreciate large amounts of vague or unnecessary text.

Whatever the University's policy on single or double-sided copies, the distribution copies could be double-sided paper, or digital, so that forests and postage accounts are not excessively depleted by the exercise. Your adviser could help you to make up a list of interested and/or potentially useful people for such a mailing list. Your adviser might also help by funding the copies and postage if they are not covered by your scholarship. A CD with your thesis will be cheaper than a paper copy. You don't have to burn them all yourself: companies make multiple copies for several dollars a copy.

The following comment comes from Marilyn Ball of the Australian National University in Canberra: "When I finished writing my thesis, a postdoc wisely told me to give a copy to my parents. I would never have thought of doing that as I just couldn't imagine what they would do with it. I'm very glad to have taken that advice as my parents really appreciated receiving a copy and proudly displayed it for years. (My mother never finished high school and my father worked with trucks - he fixed 'em, built 'em, drove 'em, sold 'em and junked 'em. Nevertheless, they enjoyed having a copy of my thesis.)"

Writing a thesis is tough work. One anonymous post doctoral researcher told me: "You should tell everyone that it's going to be unpleasant, that it will mess up their lives, that they will have to give up their friends and their social lives for a while. It's a tough period for almost every student." She's right: it is certainly hard work, it will probably be stressful and you will have to adapt your rhythm to it. It is also an important rite of passage and the satisfaction you will feel afterwards is wonderful. On behalf of scholars everywhere, I wish you good luck!

The introduction should be interesting. If you bore the reader here, then you are unlikely to revive his/her interest in the materials and methods section. For the first paragraph or two, tradition permits prose that is less dry than the scientific norm. If want to wax lyrical about your topic, here is the place to do it. Try to make the reader want to read the heavy bundle that has arrived uninvited on his/her desk. Go to the library and read several thesis introductions. Did any make you want to read on? Which ones were boring?

This section might go through several drafts to make it read well and logically, while keeping it short. For this section, I think that it is a good idea to ask someone who is not a specialist to read it and to comment. Is it an adequate introduction? Is it easy to follow? There is an argument for writing this section – or least making a major revision of it – towards the end of the thesis writing. Your introduction should tell where the thesis is going, and this may become clearer during the writing.

How many papers? How relevant do they have to be before you include them? Well, that is a matter of judgement. On the order of a hundred is reasonable, but it will depend on the field. You are the world expert on the (narrow) topic of your thesis: you must demonstrate this.

A political point: make sure that you do not omit relevant papers by researchers who are like to be your examiners, or by potential employers to whom you might be sending the thesis in the next year or two.

Another disadvantage is that your journal articles may have some common material in the introduction and the "Materials and Methods" sections.

The exact structure in the middle chapters will vary among theses. In some theses, it is necessary to establish some theory, to describe the experimental techniques, then to report what was done on several different problems or different stages of the problem, and then finally to present a model or a new theory based on the new work. For such a thesis, the chapter headings might be: Theory, Materials and Methods, {first problem}, {second problem}, {third problem}, {proposed theory/model} and then the conclusion chapter. For other theses, it might be appropriate to discuss different techniques in different chapters, rather than to have a single Materials and Methods chapter.

Here follow some comments on the elements Materials and Methods, Theory, Results and discussion which may or may not correspond to thesis chapters.

When writing this section, concentrate at least as much on the physical arguments as on the equations. What do the equations mean? What are the important cases?

When you are reporting your own theoretical work, you must include rather more detail, but you should consider moving lengthy derivations to appendices. Think too about the order and style of presentation: the order in which you did the work may not be the clearest presentation.

Suspense is not necessary in reporting science: you should tell the reader where you are going before you start.

Take care plotting graphs. The origin and intercepts are often important so, unless the ranges of your data make it impractical, the zeros of one or both scales should usually appear on the graph. You should show error bars on the data, unless the errors are very small. For single measurements, the bars should be your best estimate of the experimental errors in each coordinate. For multiple measurements these should include the standard error in the data. The errors in different data are often different, so, where this is the case, regressions and fits should be weighted (i.e. they should minimize the sum of squares of the differences weighted inversely as the size of the errors.) (A common failing in many simple software packages that draw graphs and do regressions is that they do not treat errors adequately. UNSW student Mike Johnston has written a that plots data with error bars and performs weighted least square regressions. It is at http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/3rdyearlab/graphing/graph.html). You can just 'paste' your data into the input and it generates a .ps file of the graph.

In most cases, your results need discussion. What do they mean? How do they fit into the existing body of knowledge? Are they consistent with current theories? Do they give new insights? Do they suggest new theories or mechanisms?

Try to distance yourself from your usual perspective and look at your work. Do not just ask yourself what it means in terms of the orthodoxy of your own research group, but also how other people in the field might see it. Does it have any implications that do not relate to the questions that you set out to answer?

This chapter should usually be reasonably short – a few pages perhaps. As with the introduction, I think that it is a good idea to ask someone who is not a specialist to read this section and to comment.

If you have found these documents useful, please feel free to pass the address or a hard copy to any other thesis writers or graduate student organisations. Please do not sell them, or use any of the contents without acknowledgement.

This document will be updated occasionally. If you have suggestions for inclusions, amendments or other improvements, please send them. Do so after you have submitted the thesis – I thank Marilyn Ball, Gary Bryant, Bill Whiten and J. Douglas, whose suggestions have been incorporated in this version. Substantial contributions will be acknowledged in future versions. I also take this opportunity to thank my own thesis advisers, Stjepan Marcelja and Jacob Israelachvili, for their help and friendship, and to thank the graduate students to whom I have had the pleasure to be an adviser, a colleague and a friend. Opinions expressed in these notes are mine and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the University of New South Wales or of the School of Physics.

Why and how did I write this document? The need for it was evident so, as one of my PhD students approached the end of his project, I made notes of everything that I said to him about thesis writing. These notes became the plan for the first draft of this document, which has been extended several times since then. I am surprised that it has hundreds of readers each day. However, this is an important message about the web. It takes time and thought to make a good resource but, if you do, it can benefit a lot of people. When this document was first posted, the web was relatively new and feedback showed that people were often surprised to find what they sought. Now there is a tendency to take the web for granted: one is almost disappointed not to find what one is seeking. However, the web is only as good as the collective effort of all of us. The readers of this document will be scholars, experts and educators: among the many contributions you will make to knowledge and your communities, there may be contributions that should be made freely available, all over the world. Keep this observation about the web in the back of your mind for when you are not writing a thesis.

Kaira Zoe Canete

Becoming Resilient: Disaster Recovery in Post-Yolanda Philippines through Women's Eyes

Brenda L. Croft

Kurrwa (stone tool/axehead) to Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin): hand-made/held-ground. An enduring, collaborative, practice-led research journey representing a distinct Australian First Nations Storying/Storywork and First Nations Performative Autoethnography as subalter/N/ative archive and methodology – created from the rememorying, re/imagined standpoint of a Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra | Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish woman

Samira Garshasbi

Development and testing of advanced nano-scale fluorescent materials for urban heat mitigation

Jasmine Guffond

Listening Back

Kate Judith

A Material Semiotic Exploration of Interstitiality with Mangroves

Rodney Love

Geniza: An Annotated  /Archive of a Discarded Life

Hong An James Nguyen

Making Chó bò*: Troubling Vietspeak

Luke Vitale

The Chinese of Europe and Pioneer Legends: race, labour and Italians in White Australia, 1888 to 1940

Attila Balogh

Essays on shareholder activism and corporate governance

Bradley Hastings

Mindsets for Change Leaders: A New Leadership Development Approach

Barton Lee

Essays in Political Economics

Zhiwei Tong

Portfolio Risk Analysis: Aggregation and Allocation

Hang Wang

Essays on Information and Capital Markets

Prateek Bahl

Respiratory Droplets: Understanding their Dynamics and Limiting the Spread

Lei Bai

Deep Spatial-Temporal Learning in the Correlated Time Series

Noor Adnan Sadik Baktash 

Experimental Investigation of Creep in Unsaturated Soils

Peipei Feng

Gear wear-monitoring using acoustic emission

Suresh Hettiarachchi

Re-imagining urban flood management in a warmer climate through the lens of resilience

Chaoyang Jiang

Noise Generation by Airfoils and Rotors with Porous and Serrated Trailing Edges

Dongchan Kim

In-flame soot particle structures and in-cylinder flow fields in direct-injection spark-ignition engines

Mengyao Li

Enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction of MoS2 based catalysts optimised by feasible approaches

Yiran Liu

CFD study of the combustion of innovative fuels in blast furnaces for sustainable ironmaking

Yanling Qu

Seismic analysis of gravity dam-reservoir-foundation systems using the scaled boundary finite element method

Animesh Sahoo

Improved Hybrid Techniques for Grid Fault Detection and Fault Ride-Through of Power Converters

Mohammed Abdul Qadeer Siddiqui

Theoretical and Experimental Study of Water Loss in Shale Matrix: A Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics-based Two-Phase Flow, Damage Chemo-poroelastic Investigation

Ting Wang

Synthetic methods to enable the formation and stabilisation of borohydride nanoparticles for hydrogen storage

Yixing Yang

Cohesive Subgraph Computation over Large Heterogeneous Information Networks

Zhi Zhang

Software-only Rowhammer Attacks and Countermeasures

Xiaofeng Zhu

Oxygen electrocatalysis study on carbon-based single atomic catalysts for zinc-air batteries

Ghamdan Al-Eryani

Development and implementation of multimodal single cell technologies for human immune profiling

Xupeng Bai

Investigation of the mechanisms underlying triple-negative breast cancer radioresistance

Jason Behary

The Rising Burden of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: Epidemiology, Gut Microbiota and Immunopathogenesis

Xi Chen

The relationship between dietary patterns and cognitive health among older adults

Etienne Farquhar

Understanding gene mutations driving autoimmune disease and lymphoid malignancy

Hamish Fibbins

Promoting physical health within mental health workforce culture through staff-focused exercise interventions

Zerong Ma

Development of siRNA-based Nanomedicines for the Treatment of Lung Cancer

Samuel Macdessi

The Relationship of Alignment and Balance in Total Knee Arthroplasty

Baharak Mahyad

Interrogating T cell activation from molecular to cellular scales via an integrated imaging strategy

Andre Martins Reis

The development of reference standards for genomics

Oliver Skinner

New insights into the link between protein prenylation and inflammation using models of mevalonate kinase deficiency (MKD)

Sunny Wu

Elucidating the functional diversity of stromal cells in breast tumours using single-cell and spatial transcriptomics

Ali Alinezhad Chamazketi

Direct growth of Pt on Ni Nanoparticles as Efficient Electrocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction and Oxygen Reduction Reaction

Hsiang-Sheng Chen

The Effect of Degree of Ordering of Alloy Catalyst to Electrocatalysis

Kamran Dastafkan

Modulating Surface and Interface Chemistry for Advancing Electrochemical Water Splitting

Jingyi Ding

Woodland structure and function in response to increasing aridity

Chen Jia

Rational Design of Carbon-based Catalysts for Efficient Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide

Emily Kahl

High-performance computing and its applications to atomic structure physics

Daniel Keith

Fast measurement and operation of exchange-based precision donor qubits

Yu Liu

The mesolimbic dopamine activity signatures of relapse to alcohol-seeking

Matthew Rendell

Spin dynamics of holes in GaAs and Ge semiconductor nanostructures

Alice Russo

Characterising the endogenous and exogenous virome of invasive amphibians and arthropods

Eileen Stech

Internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy for panic disorder: Emphasising exposure to enhance outcomes

Qijing Sun

Development and Characterization of Zr-based Ultrastable Metallic Glasses

Yonatan Vanunu

The underlying mechanism of risky choice under cognitive load

Ashif Aminulloh Fathnan

Broadband Microwave and Millimetre-wave Metasurfaces

Junpeng Zhang

Moving Object Detection and Tracking for Satellite Video Surveillance