What it takes to finish the PhD, part 1

1.  Perform studies for three years.  Work on projects in five different areas.  Get lectured about not responding to emails fast enough.  Learn many clever tricks to locate code snippets to patch into your own work.

2.  Create a thesis outline.  Watch your adviser rewrite it.  Rewrite it again as you begin working on your thesis (it's just a guideline, really).

3.  Read several other dissertations trying to get a sense of how one puts together such a document.  Puzzle over what in the world makes your adviser say the one packed with grammar mistakes is well-written.  Come to the realization that dissertations are unofficially ranked first on thoroughness and second on originality; writing style is far less a consideration.

4.  Bring the graduate coordinator a present for Christmas.  Then start pestering him/her for help with keeping deadlines straight and finding forms, because your professor has only a tenuous grasp on what needs to be done by when.

5.  Dig out the technical design reports for each component of the experiment.  Backtrack references in other dissertations to locate valid papers.  Waste time complaining about how poorly referenced and/or inaccurate those bibliographies are.

6.  Track down a template of your graduate school's dissertation format.  Spend eight hours figuring out how to merge the experiment's style guidelines into the template.  Spend another six battling with why the bibliography doesn't match the formatting you are positive you just coded (for those new to LaTex: a failed compile needs to be followed by deleting all files produced by that compile process--otherwise the next compile will try to start where its predecessor left off, with bad files).

7.  Spend weeks buried in technical papers sorting out how the detector and its software turn particles into data.  Take copious notes.

8.  Spend a couple of days converting those notes into text (seriously--it was about eight hours of reading TDRs for two hours of writing, or less).  Rephrase the notes as much as possible to avoid copying the original documents.

9.  Back up your dissertation in multiple places, on multiple pieces of hardware.

10.  Ask five professors to sit on your committee.  Puzzle over who outside of your department would be willing to read through a physics dissertation.  Be very grateful that CERN makes it into the news so that asking a non-physicist to join the committee is greeted with "Oh, I've heard about that and would like to learn more."