Help me write my dissertation acknowledgments

March 13, 2011 2:21 PM

Suggestions for a dissertation acknowledgments section?

I'm < > this close to being done with my dissertation but I need to write my acknowledgments section.

I'm not a very emotional person but I feel like I might go overboard with this opportunity.

General advice on this would be welcome, but also... I need a list of appropriate and inappropriate people. Specifically...

- I need to know if I need to list all the undergrad research assistants by name or just the good ones or just "undergrad research assistants" generally?

- I collected some of the data during a Fulbright. How do I acknowledge them/it?

- What about all my cohortmates and pals that were good emotional support?

- How do I thank my partner and toddler for putting up with a lot of bullshit?

- I don't want to thank my parents. Will it look back if I thank a bunch of friends but not my parents? What if my parents ever read it and are offended.

- My advisor is amazing and has been a great editor. My committee members have been not AS involved. How can I thank them all without making it sound like ADVISOR RULES!!! #1#1#1?

- What about acknowledging faculty members that weren't on my committee but wrote letters for me or co-authored pieces with me?

- I'd love to thank MetaFilter but I don't want my affiliation with the site to be published.

Or would it be better to keep this section short and sweet and be general and not name names?

posted by k8t to Education (22 answers total)

How do I thank my partner and toddler for putting up with a lot of bullshit?

Many people handle this in the dedication.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:27 PM on March 13, 2011

Response by poster: So one can do a dedication apart from acknowledgments?

https://www.graddiv.ucsb.edu/pubs/filing_guide/organize/

"Dedication and/or Acknowledgements (optional)

Students may use this section to dedicate their manuscript to someone or to acknowledge particular persons in their lives. Within the usual margin restrictions, any format is acceptable for these pages. The acknowledgements, along with any other preliminary sections or parts of the thesis or dissertation, must be reviewed and approved by the student's committee."
posted by k8t at 2:30 PM on March 13, 2011

Does your institution keep dissertations on record? I found going over the acknowledgments of other theses helpful when I was thesising. For what it's worth, I dedicated my thesis to my partner ("For Jordan, who keeps me grounded") AND gave him a shout-out in the acknowledgments. To the extent that it might be helpful, here were my acknowledgments (though again, they were in line with the culture and traditions of the theses acknowledgments at my institution):

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank [thesis advisor], for her enthusiasm, her encouragement, and her resolute dedication to the strangeness of my poetry. I am also indebted to my committee members, [committee names], whose passion for children's literature has inspired me to take my own passions seriously.

I would like to thank my family—my mother, [name], and my sister, [name]—for their love and support during my odyssey in Florida. Artists themselves, they have always encouraged me towards excellence.

I am eternally obliged to Mr. WanKenobi, the Penelope to my Odysseus, whose patience and humor have rescued me from peril more times than I can recall.

I would also like to thank my friends, the writers [I didn't want to name anyone specifically, for risk of leaving someone out], who are now scattered along the length of the east coast. Without their letters and their coffee dates, I would have been lost.

Speaking of coffee, I'd like to thank the staff of Volta in downtown Gainesville for tolerating my presence once a week (and sometimes much more often than that) for the past year. Their coffee kept me writing.

And finally, though he can't possibly know how much of a help he has been, I'd like to thank Sammy Katz [yes, I thanked my cat], who puts the “companion” in “companion animal.”

posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 2:31 PM on March 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

Partner & kid get a 'most of all'

Supervisor gets named thank you, committee get group thank you, unless you want to pick out specific people.

Don't worry about leaving out the parents.

Pick out specific friends for thanks if they deserved it.

Leave MeFi out, we know our place.
posted by biffa at 2:32 PM on March 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

You should acknowledge all sources of funding. Everything else is up to you.

Thanking the undergraduate assistants collectively is fine; in my field, I have often seen thank yous to "the staff at such-and-such" archive. You can single out particularly good assistants if you wish ("thank you to Joe and Schmo and all the rest of the undergraduate research assistants").

Generally, it is polite to include the whole of your committee, but I wouldn't worry about writing about how your advisor rules if they really rule. It's expected that you will have a much closer relationship with them; indeed, you don't really need to include the committee if they didn't really contribute to the end product. (Much more awkward is when your advisor undermines your dissertation than drops you like a hot potato - what do you write then?)

Helpful friends, definitely, if you want to - I recently was acknowledged for just being in a thesis club for 6 months with someone. Same goes for your spouse and children; thanking them for putting up with you is often done, and you do it by writing "thank you to my spouse and children for putting up with me".

But (other than funding sources), there is no one that must be included - including parents. If your parents were not part of the thesis process, then they should understand not being in the acknowledgements. You can always thank them for giving birth to you, raising you up right, etc, if you're worried about it, but I don't think it's expected.
posted by jb at 2:35 PM on March 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I went from Oscar-speechy to ultra-minimalist, and I still prefer the minimalist approach.

As jb says, first priority is to acknowledge funding sources ("..done with the assistance of a Fulbright Scholarship" or similar), then tip the hat to your advisor and any co-authors because that's showing respect for collaborative efforts, but there's nothing wrong with "there are many people who deserve thanks, and I thank them. All errors, etc. are mine alone." Followed by sending out thank-you cards to those people.
posted by holgate at 2:36 PM on March 13, 2011

- My advisor is amazing and has been a great editor. My committee members have been not AS involved. How can I thank them all without making it sound like ADVISOR RULES!!! #1#1#1?

Singling out your advisor from the rest of the committee is expected. No one will be hurt by this.

- What about acknowledging faculty members that weren't on my committee but wrote letters for me or co-authored pieces with me?

Unless they contributed to the research for your dissertation, don't include them.

- Also include acknowledgement of any sources of funding for your research, including the Fulbright, by name of the organization and grant number (if you know it). It is also appropriate to include a disclaimer that your opinions are not necessarily theirs.
posted by yeolcoatl at 2:37 PM on March 13, 2011

If you like, you could always pull up a few recent dissertations from your field and check out the acknowledgements; this is what made me realise that funding bodies should be acknowledged and also people like archives staff, etc, or lab technitians or whatever other helpful people helped you (I would have done the latter anyways, but didn't automatically think of the former).
posted by jb at 2:38 PM on March 13, 2011

Err on the side of inclusion, but realize the acknowledgments are mostly for you rather than anyone else. Be effusive where you like, but no need to overdo it when you don't want to. This is also the place you can be funny or witty.... (I thanked my friend for proofreading and catching my many "typographaphical errors"). In the end, dedicate to your partner and son. (My dedication was to my wife "even though she probably won't get much past this page.") She read the next page just to prove me wrong... If you'd like a copy of my acknowledgments, send me a MeMail.

PS. There's a bit of UCSB history with the person who tried to add a "Disacknowledgments" page because he did not get along well with a few members of his committee. It was quite the free speech vs. decorum kerfuffle as I understand it.
posted by JMOZ at 2:42 PM on March 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

The acknowledgments at my university were entirely free-form; they are there for you, not as part of any official section. Anything (within reason) was acceptable to the university -- I know, because I turned in a large Venn diagram as my acknowledgments. The reviewers at the university noticed it, mentioned it, but completely allowed it.
posted by Peter Petridish at 2:57 PM on March 13, 2011

I found going over the acknowledgments of other theses helpful when I was thesising.

Yeah, look at a few others and gank their sentance structure. There's only so many ways you can say thank you and it really helps to drop names into a pre-set format. Chances are high that they did the same with some of theirs, and looking at several will help you see patterns rather than copy/paste directly. Also, I'm happy to send you mine if you like (it's nearly two pages long), let me know.

Here's a general structure which I saw a lot:

Supervisors in first paragraph (I guess this also includes your committee, it's structured slightly differently here). Thank them all then put something extra or special about any that deserve it. It's totally fine to be all 'this guy was awesome' when they really did give you a lot more input, it's not like it was a secret that they spent all that time with you.

Funding next paragraph, This is where your fullbright would go. There may be a specific wording you're supposed to use, so take a look at their instructions or papers/theses published by other people with the same funding. If nothing else using the formula is one less thing to think about.

Major collaborators. The people you worked on papers or who gave you letters with are totally fine to include here. I worked in a lot of different labs so I had several paragraphs.

People that provided training. This may be the same as above and/or mixed in together (I did the latter). Either give a paragraph for each location/research group or run them together, depending on how your research was conducted.

Peers/helpers. This is where I'd put the lab assistants. List them all by name if there aren't many and you remember them, feel free to just put a general thankyou for all if not. You can also single out one or two but only if they went above and beyond for some reason, either at work (I thanked some people separately because they helped with a specifically horrible experiment which got it's own listing) or if they were friends. But workplace friends not just buddies. So in my case I listed other PhD students as providing peer support because it was more than just having fun at the pub, we really did support each other's career goals and share advice and all that stuff.

Anything else. I had editing help so that was listed here.

Then personal. Thanking your family is totally fine. I didn't thank my parents because I'm in my mid thirties, I hadn't lived with them for ten years when I started the PhD. Do whatever you think will fly for your family. This is the one bit where you get to say what you really think so don't put them in if you don't want to. I did thank my now-husband and also my cats. So thanking your partner and children is totally fine. I think of this as giving them last author status with all the prestige that entails.


Definitely name names and be as long as you need. Things which are very important to include are supervision, funding, and training. At my Uni you'd actually get in trouble for leaving those out because they made significant contributions to the thesis, just like you have to list appropriate authors on a paper and list funding etc. My work was collaborative so I also have a page which explicitly lists where work was done by someone else (like I did 2D gels and someone else identified the spots by MS, that last part is listed on this page), and it did come up in my defence. Again, this was something specifically asked for by my Uni so may not apply to you.

Lastly, I wrote mine at the end when I was in a really bad mood. People weren't getting back to me and I was just sick of the whole thing. It was awesome. No over thinking it, not getting caught up in emotion, just banged the damn thing out and got it done. Also a big dose of gratitude made me feel batter for the rest of the day, which I needed just then. I did edit it later to make sure it was OK, and I can't really recommend getting into that bad mood to start with, but yeah. It worked!
posted by shelleycat at 3:10 PM on March 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

(Much more awkward is when your advisor undermines your dissertation than drops you like a hot potato - what do you write then?)

You take the one example thesis they gave you, written by their most recent student, and you copy word for word what that student wrote. Particularly when it's worded "I must thank ..." rather than anything effusive. Yeah they'll notice, and you'll still feel smug years later. (lets just say my MSc acknowledgements aren't as long or friendly as my PhD ones).

Which really just goes to show that you can do whatever you want here, anything from the bare minimum or personal handcrafted thanks to every person who went near the thesis. So do what works for you.
posted by shelleycat at 3:17 PM on March 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Name names, by all means.

Think of your acknowledgments section as an inverted triangle of importance, moving from the broadest (all funding entities, with special thanks to named individuals who facilitated your funding process), to the middle (professional thanks to committee members, and to advisor and his/her time, effort, wisdom, mentoring), to the bottom (colleagues, without whose company through bad coffee and great conversation you might have lost hope), and then to the tip--those closest ones who were closest to you, forgave much, put up with much and loved much.

Congratulations! I wish you the best with whatever comes next for you!
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:39 PM on March 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Do whatever you want. At the University of Oregon, the only requirements of the Acknowledgements and Dedication was that they fit in margins.
posted by pmb at 3:59 PM on March 13, 2011

I thanked my dealer, just saying.
posted by fourcheesemac at 4:50 PM on March 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

I agree that you should do whatever you want, especially for the dedication.

Acknowledgements seem a bit different. The dissertations from my group (and also dissertations from other folk in the department) seemed to be written with exactly two audiences in mind:
1. Your family (whomever from your family) who will receive a gift copy a/o leaf through one.
2. Your labmates, particularly the ones left behind when you finish. Your lab will keep a copy, presumably: your labmates & newer students/postdocs & visiting scholars are likely to crack open your thesis, even if only to skim your introductory material or your references.

Its probably polite to mention your funding sources, but I feel confident in saying that only readers with a personal connection to *you* will ever look at your acknowledgements section for any reason other than to plagiarize your phrasing.
posted by janell at 5:25 PM on March 13, 2011

You are overthinking this a bit, but at this stage, it would be weird if you weren't. Here's mine with names redacted:

I would like to thank Dr. advisor for his guidance and support throughout the production of this research and thesis. I would also like to thank [committee members individually named] for their helpful suggests and for serving on my dissertation committee. I would also like to thank my fellow lab members, past and present, for their assistance and support over the years: [indidivual names here, no undergrads mentioned, but if you had a great one, put them here].

I would like to thank my parents, [first names], and all my friends for their unwavering support and encouragement throughout the years. Finally, I would like to thank my loving husband, [name], and son, [name], for sticking with me through all the good times and bad, and helping to keep me sane, and my puppy, [name], for never failing to lift my spirits.


Yes, I thanked my husband, infant son, and dog. They deserved it. I named my parents because I thought they deserved it after years of raising me and putting me through undergrad, but there is no way they were ever going to read my thesis. If you parents might, then you should be them in, if not, leave them out. Advisor should be singled out for extra praise, especially if they rocked. No one is going to fail you because your acknowledgments are off. In fact, I'd lay odds that no one will even read the acknowledgements. Whether you can have both acknowledgments and dedication depends on your school, as the person who is proofing the thing for final publication for the school (the professional person in the grad school office).
posted by katers890 at 5:51 PM on March 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think it's OK to thank the undergrad research assistants collectively. If you want to call out the good ones by name, one way to do it is to acknowledge "[collective group], especially [name] for [specific help] and [name] for [specific help]." For example, "I benefited from the able assistance of the reference staff at the Doctoral University Library. Special thanks go to Lila Librarian for tracking down a second edition of Very Rare Book Title and Sam Specialist for suggesting that I look into the Interesting Archives."
posted by Orinda at 6:21 PM on March 13, 2011

...and to actually complete my thought (don't post while making dinner!), if you follow the inverted triangle, move from more formal to more personal and affectionate as you go down the list. It wouldn't be appropriate to mention the bad coffee with funders, but yeah, with friends and colleagues? Sure.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:41 PM on March 13, 2011

I don't understand why you would want to leave people out. Your undergrad research assistants worked directly on your project? How would you feel if you were acknowledged merely as one of many "undergrad research assistants?"

It's OK to leave out people you don't think are deserving, but "short and sweet" is not a virtue for dissertation acknowledgment sections.
posted by grouse at 11:50 PM on March 13, 2011

I thanked The Rathskeller in my acknowledgments because they had 2.50 pitchers of beer so I don't think you can really do anything wrong. Just go with whatever you want and have fun with it.
posted by koolkat at 3:14 AM on March 14, 2011

Response by poster: Written! Thanks all.
posted by k8t at 4:23 PM on March 14, 2011 [1 favorite]