Just saw this announcement in the September 2011 issue of the
UP Newsletter:
Thesis/Dissertation workshop in October
The UP College of Mass Communication Foundation, Inc. (UPCMCFI) will conduct a Thesis/Dissertation Seminar-Workshop on October 21 and 22 at the College of Mass Communication, UP Diliman.
Teachers, researchers, graduate students, government workers and private sector employees who need to know more about writing a thesis and dissertation will greatly benefit from the workshop.
Faculty members of the UP CMC Department of Communication Research will facilitate the workshop.
For more details, please call Kat Ramos of UPCMCFI at (02) 981-8500 local 2678. You may also send an email to katkatramos@gmail.com and join UPCMCFI’s Facebook group (facebook.com/groups/upcmcfoundation).
Now my question is: Why a “thesis/dissertation workshop?” Why not a workshop on “How to write and publish a research paper” instead?
What is the sense of writing a thesis, then rewriting it for publication? I think this practice is the main reason why most of our graduate students think that the end of graduate training is the thesis, or that the end of research is the conference paper. And also the reason why most of them have an unpublished PhD thesis.
There are good books (in each field) on how to write research papers (ignore the chapter on writing thesis). Graduate students should learn from them. Then when they are ready to write the manuscript, they should strictly follow the “Instruction to Authors” of the chosen journal (ISI-indexed). They should at the same time refer to an article or two from the chosen journal; they should, for example, observe the details in writing the cited references in the text and at the end, like the use of the comma and period.
This should be a good start to reform the research practice in the country, where UP can lead.
