The difference between a Master's thesis and a PhD thesis

this is my Master's thesis and this is my PhD thesis and whilst they are quite similar they also differ extensively and in today's video I'm going to be talking about how they differ and the differences between how they're assessed what their content is and what you can expect from both of them so the main difference is that the PHD thesis is a result of original research and original data so the premise of a PhD is that you as an author so me as a PhD student I'm working on something original which is that means something that no one has looked at before no one has published anything about before and the main like category the main thing for when an examiner is looking at your PhD thesis is the fact that the data that has been published and that has been printed within it is original that's number one the Master's thesis this is not the case the Master's thesis whilst it does work on a new kind of research it does not have to be original it is based off of the methods or application of someone else's work so usually what you're doing a master's thesis is you've got your supervisor you're in your lab you will take their like work and you'll kind of take a little subsection they'll give you a little bit for you to do so whilst you can publish and actually all the data that I did for my masters it ended up in two research papers that were published later on it by itself is not original work so it by itself makes up part of a bigger project whereas the PHD thesis in itself is a research paper so in itself is substantial enough to be published as original work whereas this isn't okay the next thing is the time that it takes to complete the work the length of how long it takes and the length of the actual thesis itself is very different as you can see so this is my PhD thesis it is how many pages long is it it is 217 pages long very long whilst my Master's thesis is not as long it is only 70 pages so not as long at all um and mine were both in the fields of this is cell and developments biology and this one is in the field of neurotrauma like neuroscience and TBI traumatic brain injury this took me six months to write so part of your Grant includes thesis writing sometimes not always but it does include these writing so that means you do three years of a PhD and then after that you are allowed to take off I took six months to write um so during that six months you are kind of in and out of the lab sometimes you realize that oh I need to redo this experiment or I don't have enough data or My Graph isn't quite right or my images aren't quite right so you are sometimes having to go back and forth and I was kind of doing some experiments to consolidate some things but um you can take some time out people go traveling and do writing Retreats abroad and just you know go and rights in peace whereas with this like it just takes a week or two of sitting down like a few weeks of sitting down and writing so not as much time and the main difference for what the length is is the fact that this is quite broad the data in this and the information in this when I'm looking back at it now I'm like wow that is really really bored I just wrote about so Colony PCR I wrote four like three lines about PCR whereas in here my PCR page is like two pages um and it's the fact that like you're writing at such a low level at the time I I thought this was pretty high level stuff but looking back and I was like this is so simple it's so basic because it really is your Master's thesis is just skimming the surface of the understanding and the knowledge that you need whereas your PhD thesis the PHD thesis is in-depth like you're really going into the concept you're going into the um theories you're going into the literature you're critiquing you're finding like you know you're finding ways to um like find limitations you're finding ways to find new knowledge and answer questions in novel and you know innovative ways and so you really have to go in depth when it comes to your thesis and even just thinking about what I did during my time during my Master's thesis I didn't I don't think I went during Masters I mean I don't think I even went to a single conference or seminar maybe I went to one um but I just I wasn't very active within the research field it was very much like I have to do this thesis whereas during my PhD I was engrossed into my topic I used to go to seminars I would like I would put myself forward for post presentations and I would want to learn more about the field I speak to people to collaborate I'd be emailing people that I think are interesting I'm constantly searching like PubMed for new papers new research that comes out I'm attending like um things online and I'm traveling across the world to go to seminars and conferences that are you know that are interesting and you're really we know when you're a PhD student that topic and that research field becomes second nature to you like it becomes everything to you like you become it you are you are the expert of it you really truly are and it's such a small field it's such a small small aspect of the overall like field and overall breadth of knowledge that you know you're focusing on such a small area and you you really become the expert which is why I always say that the viver is not examiners testing you because I you know you know more than them this is your expertise they are just having an academic discussion with you so yeah that's the main difference between these two like looking back at this I just I feel like a master's student looking back at this I feel like an expert in my field and the research PhD journey is not an easy one by far but there are so many resources and tools that you can use to help you along that Journey this segment of the video is kindly sponsored by researcher.life which is a subscription-based platform that offers tools and services to help researchers Thrive at every step of their Journey researcher.life has a range of tools and services that include writing publishing reading citing learning and networking and also illustrating and promoting your work on sign up you get access to 11 free tools and this is all part of the essentials part and I'm going to run through a couple of my favorites so the first is called a mind the gap and this is a tool that allows you to illustrate it has a number of different templates you can choose for molecules from different backgrounds you can add titles and texts and graphs you can generate really beautiful scientific images from it the second is our upscale courses and one of my particular favorite ones is about writing a literature review as you can see here the next is paper pal and I've spoken about this so much before because I absolutely love it it is an academic writing assistant you've got a word plugin as well which corrects your work for you as you write the next benefit is our Discovery and our Discovery allows you to discover new papers that are relevant to your field and set up your own literature reading feed and these provide you with papers that are relevant to your topic and allow you to be always on top of your reading last but not least this is the submission Readiness Checker and allows you to upload your manuscript and check if your manuscript is ready to be submitted to journals and as you can see here I have a loaded something that is not ready at all it's absolutely not something I would submit to a journal so you can see that the percentage is really low and it shows you exactly what the issues are in terms of your language and allows you to know what to correct to get accepted by a journal with the essentials that you get a hint or a child of all these amazing tools however the prime pack has a lot more in store for you where you get access to longer subscriptions of each of these benefits and you can keep using them for a much longer period Prime pack is exclusive membership for researchers where you get access to over 15 premium benefits that are worth 999 dollars at the cost of only 99 a year it's like 8.25 per month and there's so much value because there are so many leading Brands within the researcher.life group and this allows you to save so much valuable time but also save money on on all the resources that they offer so check out the prime pad I'll leave the link for it in the description box down below there's also a 10 discount code with the code Amina 10 which I'll leave over here so feel free to try it and let me know how you find it next difference is to do with the examiners so how is your thesis actually examined so let's start with the Masters the Master's thesis is usually not really examined in a really formal way you simply submit this to your professor or or you're like you're usually it's the course organizer um but anyway you submits to someone within your University so it can sometimes be double marked so sometimes it'll be marked by two people but usually it's just marked by one person you'll get a grade and what's your uncle you may need to do presentation so sometimes they'll ask for a presentation of your work and that kind of comes as part of your module so there'll be as your Masters there'll be like a module that you do which is a majority will be like maybe 75 80 and within that includes a presentation so you have to actually stand there in person and present probably to your um your group and that is part that that's it that is your assessment pretty much and that's as far as it goes so it's all internal this is where it differs a lot to this bad boy now this bad boy does a lot of Journeys and loads of Air Miles train miles or car Miles Road miles this guy does a lot of it so what happens is you have two examiners you have an internal exam and external examiners your internal examiner for my case would have been someone at UCL University um and then your external examiner is someone outside of UCL you need to have like no affiliation so it's usually someone who you haven't like published a paper with or you're not like collaborating with of course so there's no bias now what happens is you print out your thesis you print two copies out when you initially submit it and you take it to the graduate school so UCL has a like an office a graduate school office you go there it's a counter and you give your two Theses to them and it gets shipped away to the external examiner and an internal person has it gets it as well and there's actually a stamp right there let's stop right there it says dispatch to examiner bam and that was on the first of August 2017. um and it gets dispatched The Examiner and that is the last you hear from it for a few a little while actually I think my driver was in November and then once you've actually completed your viver and you've got your Corrections so you might have like spelling mistakes or video experiments or add a section or whatever Corrections you are you have to do you make those Corrections and then you resubmit it so you either if the corrections are minor then there's no resubmission you just have to print it out again give it to the grad school and then it ends up in a you know in somewhere or and you also submit it to the UCL online repository which is where all the UCL or any University does is but all the Theses are there so that's one thing that you do with this so this guy doesn't look this guy does does a journey the internal and external examiners need to be in sync when it comes to what they think about your thesis and they write their comments and they will say what they what they think and then yeah you deal with that last but not least is the assessment methods so as I mentioned the examiners you know that's internal internal and external and then assessment is usually a presentation for this as I mentioned and for this it's the Viva as I mentioned so it's the fact that they want to see you in person with your PhD thesis they have to see you in person it's not enough to just have a thesis printed and then submit it and you've got your PhD and you have to engage in academic discussion about your work and that kind of validifies the fact that you are the person that did this work so yeah it's really important that that is also kind of completed as part of the um PhD process if you don't do if you don't attend your viver you fail you fail your PhD so actually this thesis the existence of this thesis is all because I attended my viver and I passed my Viber so this no this yes so yeah that is the main difference between a PhD thesis and a master's thesis I hope that that gave you some information and some insight into the differences at the time of doing a masters you probably think that this is the most difficult thing in the world but actually it really isn't like the thesis is so much bigger the Masters is really just a few a little a little thing that you have to do to get past um but the PHD thesis is really like it encompasses all the hard work and all the hours and all the time spent um you know getting all that research done but also don't forget to check out researcher.life for all the tools and packages as I mentioned above um and the link will be in my description and also be a discount code which I'll leave down below as well and let me know how you what you thought what is like did you think that the difference would be so stuck between the two and yeah if you enjoyed this don't forget to leave me a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to see more from me on the channel and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: Dr Amina Yonis

Views: 17,069

Keywords:

Id: ohI3zq-KlOA

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023