Completing the Thesis Defence: The Final Boss of a Graduate Degree

This past summer, several of the students in PVL had the opportunity to go through the timeless ritual that all us academics undergo in order to earn our MSc and PhD degrees: the oral defense of our research. I can report that everyone made it through with flying colours! Of course, a defence is also a transition for the student who may be moving from an MSc into a PhD, from a PhD into a Postdoc or from their MSc into the working world, amongst other paths. If you are considering getting a higher degree and want to know what this hurdle looks like, or are starting to think about your own defense, Grace has some helpful insight below. 
(Image above from XKCD Comics: https://xkcd.com/1403/)

 by Grace Bischof

The end of the summer marked a busy time in the Planetary Volatiles Lab. Conor, Giang and I were each nervously preparing for our upcoming thesis defences, where we would learn if we were to pass and obtain our degrees, or fail and be very, very sad. Giang, reaching the end of his PhD in August, defended first, setting the tone for the rest of us by passing! Conor and I followed, defending on September 7th and 8th (apologies to our shared committee members who had to sit in back-to-back defences). Conor and I were also successful in defending our theses, meaning we both obtained our master’s degrees. It was a very exciting end to the summer.

So, what is a thesis defence and why is it so nerve-wracking? In a research-based degree, the findings of the research you complete over several years get written up into a document – at York, this is a thesis for a master’s and a dissertation for a PhD, which is a more robust document than a thesis. This document represents years of hard work, and hopefully, makes an original contribution to the field in which you’re studying. That, in and of itself, is a nerve-wracking process. But before the university can award you your degree for all the painstaking effort you have put into your thesis, they first must test you on the contents in the form of an oral examination.

The oral examination usually begins with a public talk, where your research is presented in a 20 minute to hour long (depending on the degree) presentation. Typically, anyone can join this portion of the defence, and for me, it was fun having my friends and family watch my presentation so they could finally stop asking what it is I actually work on. Once the public talk is over, everyone else leaves the room, so it is just you and your committee. One-by-one, the committee members take turns dissecting your thesis, asking questions, and making suggestions about the contents to facilitate discussion on your work. This process can last several hours, especially for a PhD defence which is more involved. Once the committee has run out of questions to ask, you are kicked out of the room while they deliberate. Sitting outside the room while a small number of people decide the fate on the culmination of your work is horrifying. Then you are finally called back to the room to receive to your verdict…

The good news: the thesis defence is largely a formality. That is, if your research supervisor is doing their job, you will not walk into the thesis defence if you are not going to pass. The purpose of the defence is simply to ensure the student understands their work and the literature in which it is situated. Not knowing the answer to an examiner’s question does not mean you will fail the defence. In fact, the examiners want to see you reason through their questions, applying your knowledge even when you do not have the exact answer. There was one point in my defence when I answered a question completely incorrectly but realized my error once I thought more about it. I told the committee that the answer I gave was incorrect and walked them through my thought process to answer the question correctly. The committee was more interested in seeing my reasoning in getting to the answer than they were worried about the initial mistake I made.

So, now that you know what a thesis defence is, let’s briefly walk through some tips for the defence:

1. Start preparing early. The amount of time needed to prepare is going to depend on the degree being obtained – i.e., PhD students will likely need to start earlier than master’s student. Three weeks out before my defence I began to seriously prepare. I started by compiling a list of the most important references in my thesis. I read a handful of these a day, highlighting and jotting down notes on important aspects of each paper. At this time, I was also walking through the basics of the field – sure, it might impress your committee to describe in detail all the aspects of radiative transfer in the atmosphere, but that might diminish if you forget Mars is the 4th planet from the sun.
   
   
2. Anticipate questions. About 1.5 weeks from the defence date, I began combing through my thesis line by line. I had a PDF version of my thesis which I used to highlight and make notes in the margins. I wrote down anything that came to mind when reading my work and how the committee might interpret it. Some common questions that are asked in defences are: “How does your work fit into the existing literature”; “Describe your work in a few short questions”; “In what ways can this work be expanded?”; “What limitations did you experience in this work?”. Funnily enough, I prepared for all these questions and did not get asked any of them. However, preparing for them helped me to pick apart my work more carefully, meaning I could answer the questions they did give me.
   
   
3. Try to relax as much as possible. It’s easier said than done. An important tip that I read online before defending my thesis was to make sure that in your state of nervousness, you don’t consistently interrupt the examiners while they are asking questions in an attempt to quickly prove you know the answer. When an examiner is speaking, it’s a perfect time to collect your thoughts and let them talk (it eats up more time this way too!). But, like I said, the defence is largely a formality. If you’ve done the work, then you know your stuff and you will crush it! You are allowed to sit and think about your answer before speaking, drink some water or have a snack, and take a break during the defence if needed. After the first 30 minutes of the defence, the rest breezes by.

Your thesis defence will probably be the only time you will ever have a discussion with people who have ever read the full contents of your thesis. That itself is a pretty cool opportunity, so try to enjoy it as much as you can! Hopefully in four years’ time, when I’m preparing for my PhD defence, I can come back to this blog post and try to take my own advice.  

PVL in London (Ontario, That Is)

 

This week, new PVL PhD student (formerly PVL MSc student - congrats!) Conor Hayes reflects on the just completed DPS Conference that they attended a few weeks ago. This is the first time that DPS has been in person since Geneva, Switzerland in 2019 and the first time it has ever been held in Canada. I certainly appreciated being able to experience the conference together with my graduate students as a research group without even having to bring my passport!

by Conor Hayes

It has been nearly a year since I last submitted an entry to this blog, detailing my experience at GAC-MAC 2021, my first in-person conference as a grad student. Much has happened since then; I half-pivoted away from the Moon to add a new MSL-based project to my Master's thesis less than nine months before my defence, I wrote and successfully defended said thesis, and now I'm a freshly-minted PhD student here at PVL.

Some things, however, do not change, so I am here once again to talk about our latest conference experience at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS). PVL typically puts up a strong showing at DPS because we are all planetary scientists, and this was particularly true this year for two reasons. First, DPS 54 was held in London Ontario, practically down the road (relatively speaking) from us here at York. Second, PVL’s own John Moores was Chair of the Science Organizing Committee, so we couldn’t not represent our group well.

In many ways, DPS was very similar to the two in-person conferences that I was able to attend during my Master’s – GAC-MAC back in November of last year, and the 7th Mars Atmosphere Modelling and Observations conference this summer. The scientific program was divided between oral talks and poster presentations, with a plenary session in the middle of each day. I mostly stuck to the sessions on topics that I’m interested in – the Moon, Mars, and terrestrial planets, though I did attend a few that were more “out there” (at least with reference to my own research) on Europa and other icy moons, as well as sessions on citizen science, education, and public outreach.

Although it followed this familiar pattern, DPS was very much a conference of firsts for me. Because DPS was a hybrid conference this year, each session had two chairs, at least one of whom had to be in-person. One chair would make sure that each speaker stuck to their allotted time and manage questions from in the room, while the other would monitor the session’s Slack channel, where virtual attendees could ask their questions. Due to the continually evolving health situation, there were a number of in-person chairs who had to switch to virtual attendance, meaning that some sessions no longer had an in-person chair. Several members of PVL (including myself) were recruited to take their place. The session that I chaired was titled “Dynamical Dances in Space,” and featured four talks discussing gravitational interactions between various Solar System bodies, the first of which was actually based on a newly-published paper that I had read shortly before the conference. Stepping in as chair at the last minute was a little daunting because I had no idea what to expect, but it ended up being a reasonably non-stressful affair.

Much more stressful was the fact that this was the first time that I had been invited to give an oral presentation at a “major” conference. I’ve given presentations about my research before, but always in much lower-stakes settings, whether that be in PVL group meetings or at smaller conferences run by graduate students (e.g. York’s Physics and Astronomy Graduate Executive conference or the annual Lunar and Small Bodies Graduate Forum). On top of that, I had never presented the preliminary results of my lunar work to a larger group before, so there was a lot that I was worried about. Consequently, I spent a lot of time preparing my presentation and making sure that I stayed as close to the seven minute limit we were given. In the end, the magnitude of my stress was wildly disproportional to the actual event, as my presentation went smoothly and hit the seven minute mark almost exactly. Although I would have happily taken just that as a win, it has also inspired my first official research collaboration with someone outside of PVL, something that I am very excited about.

Now that I’ve had experience with both oral and poster presentations at conferences, I think I can say that I prefer oral presentations over posters. Posters certainly do have their advantages – you present all of your information on a single page and you don’t have to worry about time limits or making sure that you remember what you want to say, as posters often come with a more conversational style of sharing information. However, I’m just not really a fan of the poster experience. During a poster session, you’re sharing a room with many other people presenting their posters at the same time, so there’s a certain element of competing for the attendees’ attention. Some people can also find approaching the presenters one-on-one more intimidating than asking a question at an oral presentation (I certainly do!), which might limit the number of interactions you have. I definitely don’t want to turn people off of poster presentations; they can be a low-stress way to ease your way into the conference experience and/or to present early/preliminary results that are still in progress.

Overall, DPS was probably my favourite conference of the handful that I have attended (either virtually or in-person) over the past two years. I can only hope that the weather in San Antonio will take a break from its usual late-summer Texas heat for DPS next year.

There and Back Again: A MAPLE Tale

 

As we approach the final year of the MAPLE project, it's time to take the instrument out into the field! This past summer, PVL PhD student Charissa Campbell and then-MSc (now PhD) student Grace Bischof took MAPLE out to Argentia, Newfoundland one of the foggiest places on Earth where the Gulf Stream meets the Labrador current. Mother nature didn't disappoint and Charissa and Grace came back with spectacular images and science.

by Charissa Campbell

This summer was quite busy as we were preparing for the deployment of our MAPLE (Mars Atmospheric Panoramic camera and Laser Experiment) instrument to the highly foggy area of Argentia, Newfoundland. There are two main field testing sites for MAPLE which includes a foggy location (large aerosols) and Arctic location (small, Martian-like aerosols). With the Arctic being more Mars-like, MAPLE will travel alone and be controlled remotely to fully mimic spaceflight conditions. However, as a starting point, we decided to travel with MAPLE to the Argentia, NL area to test in foggy conditions.

MAPLE is based on a previous experiment done by the Phoenix lander that took images of the onboard lidar laser to classify ice-water content of aerosols near the surface (https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11030). However, the camera could only take an image of a small portion of the sky, limiting the view of the laser. MAPLE is equipped with a panoramic camera to allow the full sky to be captured, which also allows for multiple lasers to be in use at the same time and clouds to be monitored during the day. For Argentia, we equipped MAPLE with 8 different lasers in a variety of wavelengths and power (class) to try to determine if a specific set was better for future measurements. Adding different wavelengths of lasers allows us to also investigate the size of aerosols. To further increase the science output of MAPLE, we will employ techniques used with the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, Curiosity) to calculate aerosol properties such as optical depth, wind properties and others.  By using knowledge from previous Martian surface missions, we can develop MAPLE in a way to maximize the amount of returnable data in a low-cost way.

Defining a mission as low-cost means trying to find the minimal amount of power, data volume and size needed to acquire your measurements. Since we are in the early stages of the project, we created MAPLE from scratch using a pelican case which held our components. This includes a panoramic camera, 8 lasers and a raspberry pi that is used to control the camera. Several battery packs were used, one for each laser and a separate larger one for just the raspberry pi. As MAPLE gets more automated, the lasers will eventually be controlled by the raspberry pi and power can be more streamlined through just the Pi. The size of MAPLE seemed to work well, and windows had to be installed in the top for the camera and lasers to shine through. I never took construction in school, so I had a lot of late nights with the drill to push through two rectangles for the laser windows. Luckily, we already had a bubble panoramic window so I simply had to construct a properly sized hole for the window. Somehow, I managed to fully construct MAPLE and not injure myself. We also got humidity measuring packs to see how sealed the inside was. Minimal humidity was noted within the case, which is a win considering we were in essentially a cloud most times we were on the field. One concern we did have with keeping MAPLE low-cost was that the images were rather large and I only equipped the raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card. A lot of extra time was spent moving files over to a portable hard drive so we will be looking into upgrading the size of the SD card while also optimizing the size of the images. 

The field site itself was really beautiful and was a bucket list item for me as Newfoundland was the last province for me to visit in Canada. Interestingly enough, there were no rental cars available on the whole island for the 2 week we were wanting to travel. However, with the coming end of the foggy season we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to make observations. I love taking different methods of transportation and stumbled upon a ferry that travels from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to, lo and behold, Argentia. There were rental cars available in North Sydney so my colleague and I flew directly there, picked up the car and immediately took it on the ferry across to the island. We were able to get a room on the ferry itself with 2 beds, a bathroom, and the best view of the ocean. This was ideal as the ferry is about 16 hours long, overnight, so the bed was very much needed. 

Once arrived, we got settled in the town of Placentia, which was a short drive to/from the field site which was in the port where our ferry was docked. They had a cool lifting bridge that was a great backdrop for determining when the fog was rolling in. We did most of our experiments back at our arrival dock.  It was originally a World War 2 airfield site owned by the Americans, given by the British for the sole purpose of making it a Naval airbase. The Atlantic Charter was signed just outside the port which was thought to lead to the United Nations Charter (https://www.hiddennewfoundland.ca/argentia-naval-station). As someone who loves reading history, it was amazing to do the experiments in such an area. We were on one of the old runways as it was perfect for pointing the lasers in a way determine how far the lasers could travel. This was the goal for the first day on the site.

As always, something will go wrong on the field site and that was the case on our first day. When we first started testing, we expected to fiddle with the image parameters, such as exposure, to see the laser. However, no matter what we did we could not see any of the lasers in the images. We had not brainstormed what would happen in this case so we took a rather long lunch break to think about what we could do to mitigate the problem. We decided to try taking images anyways in the sun and increased the number of images taken for each laser configuration. The sun might be so bright in the day that the camera simply cannot view them in the image. We also decided to do some trial runs when it got dark. One evening, the fog rolled in so heavily that I got MAPLE all set up late in the evening. It got so foggy that it truly felt like I was in a horror movie or unsolved mysteries as I was unable to see a few feet in front of me. Images of what MAPLE could see in the dark showed how important the dark was to our experiments. After gathering a variety of images, we knew what the game plan was for the rest of the trip. 

We finished our Newfoundland trip with images in both day and night that will be analyzed further. Many questions were both answered, and the trip was extremely useful on telling us how we need to prepare MAPLE for the Arctic. The trip was a challenge but a great way to gain leadership experience. Since I was not the only person on this trip, Grace has these words to say about her time on our field trip:

“Most of the research I’ve completed throughout my degree has consisted of analyzing data acquired from space missions – whether that be temperature, data or pictures taken from the surface of Mars. Because of this, my days usually involve sitting at my computer, writing code, and generally not moving around too much. Going to Newfoundland for fieldwork allowed me to explore different facets of research that I usually do not get to explore. Working with MAPLE meant driving out to the field site in the mornings, setting up the instrumentation, and taking several experiments to try and capture the science. There is a degree of unpredictability with fieldwork that we don’t normally experience in our day-to-day work. Will it be foggy enough? Will the batteries have enough power for the experiments? Will the inside of the instrument get too humid? Carrying out this fieldwork was a very unique experience, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to try something new!”