My thesis supervisors gave me a set of templates and guidelines for the whole thing and argh.

they constantly assume that I've no fucking idea about academic writing despite the very good graded talks and texts I handed in in the past - granted, they probably often deal with inexperienced students.

but what they've given me.. a) the thesis template does not work, they fucked up some latex packages and b) there's a almost passive aggressive 3 page explanation on academic writing and how wo work with sources and references and they forgot the fucking references lol. There are none included and the references all go like [?].

What are you working on for your thesis?

They have two options:

1) Assume you are rubbish at all forms of research communication and give you a package with the basics. Then later on judge on your actual writing and presentation skills and tell you in which direction to improve

2) Read something you write/have you give a presentation and judge the quality, give advice etc. In many cases that would result in the same outcome than one, but with them putting more effort (maybe) and you having a really negative insight from them or worse, whichever assholes you might present for the first time in front of.

I was glad that my supervisor chose 2 because I would also get pissed if treated like 1. But then over these years I've seen my fair share of "first timers" in presentations or writing have a very shitty experience because of lack of basic directives from their supervisor and can see the good in 1.

Don't take it personally and use the fact that you are already good at it to be able to filter good advice from bad advice

:D and all my energies!

@tattvamasi I've been tutoring a module about academic communcation and needed to grade lots of first-timer texts as well - I totally get assuming that people need assistance heh. :D

the rant was more about them throwing advides at me while at the same time handing out broken templates. especially the missing sources are a major mistake and something you usually see instantly if you bother to read your own guide. Guess the first thing I'm doing with this will be fixing it and sending it right back. :D

@devTea you mean the topic of the thesis?

i'm with the usable sec&privacy department; we're researching how incentives of different kinds might motivate users to activate 2FA. the gaming branche often gifts you ingame things, so we're going to try and replicate that for more "normal" things such as online-banking, online shopping, social media.

@SpaceHamster does your campus require you to submit your thesis to academic journal? Do you work on it alones?

I’m also going through master thesis, and damn does reading papers hard 🤯

@SpaceHamster many others will be greatfull you took the time and shared the fixes version, for sure.

I remember going to a LaTeX tutorial by one of the professors in the CS department and finding out he was quite lost about it.

By the way, I'm sure you already know this, but for any poor soul lost in the infinity of LaTeX symbol lists: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classi...

That was the most wonderful revelation I had a couple of years and several projects into the maths degree

@devTea we aim to publish later, but its not part of the task (and i won't receive a worse grade if we're not getting accepted or something like that). I work alone but have 2 supervisors who stop me before doing anything stupid. e.g. we're spending money to pay for survey participation and they help make sure the concept works before we waste anything.

oh yeaa, reading is such an annoying task xD I usually read abstracts and limitations/results first, then the rest if I still think its relevant for me, but I'm still not good at concentrating on text for long periods of time.
what are you writing about? :)

@tattvamasi oh my gosh, thats wonderful! until now I've used the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) for that because it also lists all kinds of symbols and their codes but the drawing feature is awesome!
will share that with my friends and students, thank you! :)

@SpaceHamster sadly our academy require us to submit and accepted by academic journals like scopus, otherwise you can’t graduate. I don’t know a good thesis topic that could get published so I joined one of the teacher projects about deep learning image classification

@devTea for the master's thesis? That's crazy...

@tattvamasi yeah our country academics government (? Is this even the name lol) requires us to do it to graduate a master thesis, some academy are going against it, and they are undergoing a judges trial

@devTea i hope they will overrule that because its an awful idea. Research is not only about perfect solutions and success, finding that something does NOT work is also very important but often ignored since its not as fame-worthy as success-stories.
Thats also what makes research such a toxic field and why I sure as hell wont stay at the university after my degree.

Deep learning is a very cool field! :) i did a robotics lab project with tensorflow and cnns to teach a robot to recognize certain objects and point them out, found that very enjoyable (although the learning process was extremly time consuming xD)

@SpaceHamster yeah I hope they change it back, I don’t even know if I can make it or not. Good luck on your projects

@devTea good luck to you too! I'm sure it'll work out great in the end. :)
And even if it's not ideal, there'll always be more options and paths!