Thesis step by step

You will find here a description of the process of a thesis in computer science at Litis. This page is written by doctoral students, or former doctoral students, who simply want to share their feelings about the different classical stages of a thesis. However, as indicated in the first commandment of the thesis, the information given here is only indicative. Time periods are given for each stage of the thesis, these periods can be shortened or extended depending on the particular situation. Also, you may not go through all these steps in the order indicated. Nevertheless, this global progression can allow you to position yourself in relation to an average progression and help you to see more clearly where you are in your current work, while allowing you to anticipate a little your future.

This page is only interested in the progress of the thesis, from the first day of your contract to your defense. For everything that happens afterwards, a dedicated page can be consulted by clicking here.

A more official and administrative version of this page may be found on the SyGAL website.

The beginning phase of the thesis can roughly correspond to the first year of the thesis, but a more accurate approximation would be 10 months (if you start your thesis in September/October, that would make the beginning of the thesis until May/June). During this period, your task is to get a feel for your scientific subject, i.e. to understand what is the question/problem to be solved. Depending on your subject and your field, this can be more or less theoretical or more or less practical, which will lead you in one case to read a lot and in the other case to “manipulate” a lot, most likely by doing some programming.

Your second objective for the beginning of your thesis is to familiarize yourself with your working environment for at least the next 3 years. This means getting to know the places and people but also the global functioning of the laboratory and of research in general. More prosaically, you also need to familiarize yourself with your technical tools, whether it is learning a new programming language or a new library, perfecting your French (you are in a French lab, in France, it is better to know some French), or even getting your hand with physical equipment such as robots. It is for all these reasons that it is the right time to do your doctoral formations as it is precisely indicated in the commandment number 6.

Nevertheless, at the end of this first year, don't expect to have done the tour of your subject and to have understood all the corners of it. You may even feel that you have a much bigger problem than you thought and that you don't understand much of what is going on. The important thing is to be familiar with your environment and to have at least one way to deal with your problem. It may not be the right one and you may have already identified several others, but you will have to choose a first path to take to move forward. And don't panic if it's not the right one the first time, that's part of the learning process.

The transition between your beginning and the continuation is very smooth, without you even having to think about it. You have a better idea of your problematic, which may have moved from the initial title of your subject, and this is nothing serious, quite the contrary. You have a number of paths to explore and you have chosen, after consultation with your supervisor, one way to follow first.

This first track will put you on the path to your first contribution. At this stage, the objective is to concretize a first block on the beginning of the thesis that you have just spent rehashing a bunch of ideas. A contribution is a proposed answer to a question. At first, it won't be the answer to your thesis problem, but you will surely have understood that the latter deserves to be broken down into several smaller, simpler problems, which represent your different possible approaches. Your first contribution will therefore be to try to answer one of these sub-questions, which should not earn you a Nobel Prize. However, it is a first step that must be taken to its conclusion and that has the merit of laying a foundation stone on which you will be able to build the next step, even if you change course in the meantime.

It is very likely that this first contribution deserves a publication that will be proposed by your supervisors. You will certainly have doubts about the real value of this publication and about your contribution, between lack of self-confidence and impostor syndrome (and perhaps a little lucidity in the process ). This is also a challenge that should teach you how to write a scientific article while helping you to set your first moments of research in stone. And like any challenge, the probability that you will succeed on the first try without any flaws is quite low but it is called learning for a reason.

After this first somewhat solidified contribution usually by sending in a publication, another 6 to 8 months have passed and you are in the middle of your second year, maybe not far from the beginning of the third year.

On the basis of your first contribution, you can surely see a little more clearly on your subject. You also certainly see the immensity of the subject that you had not suspected and you begin to understand that your thesis will not revolutionize the world. It is not unlikely that you will even have a very negative reaction wondering if your work will ever be of any scientific interest. Spoiler alert, that's what science is all about: lots of people making tiny advances on hyper-topical subjects and all together, building on each other's small advances, we move the world forward. And very often, the fruit of a research field arrives in the common population only after several decades (artificial neural networks were invented more than 50 years before becoming the AI stars they are today).

Once you have made this observation, you will quickly understand that time is running out: you are halfway through your second year of thesis and you have clear and partially in place ideas on your scientific question, it is time to strike while the iron is hot. It is obviously the role of your supervisor to push you to explore your ideas in more depth and this will involve some serious experiments that will give rise to first results that will complement your first theoretical contribution. The organization of this experiment may give rise to new technical problems. Again, this is nothing unusual and even if it is annoying and can take a lot of time, it is part of the learning process, once again.

These new results should allow you to publish your work and perhaps you even had time to consider another scientific path that also deserves publication. If you are making good progress, your supervisor may have you work on a journal article, more substantial than a conference paper. Speaking of conferences, it is most likely in this period that you will participate for the first time. You will then have discovered that the time between the submission of your publication and its presentation in front of other researchers is important. However, as indicated in the commandment number 9, going to a conference is important and going when you have a clear idea about your subject is even more essential.

You should be at the end of your second year and the beginning of your third year, so that's between 4 and 6 months for this period.

The global structure of a thesis is divided into 3 years: The first year, the second year and the last year which can often last more than 12 months (beyond the joke, it always hurts less to say that you are in your last year than in your fourth year ). This last year always starts at the beginning of the third year of the thesis, a period that overlaps with the first results.

Normally, by the time you get there, you should be on the road to first results and first experiments, with a few papers launched and a few conferences passed. If you are not there, don't panic though, every thesis is different (commandment number 1. You will then face a duality between the beginnings of the reflection around the thesis writing and the will to solidify your scientific contributions. Clearly, you will finally become aware of the time that is running out on this thesis and understand that the finish line is approaching and therefore you will probably not have time to do all that you had in mind, even on a reduced question compared to your ambitions and the basic title you signed up on.

The objective of this first half of the third year is above all to get organized in order to progressively complete your scientific proposals, notably by writing large articles, and why not a journal article. And slowly, in the background, start thinking about the organization of your thesis and its writing phase. This does not mean starting to write, but rather thinking about the plan and trying to estimate your writing skills to better organize your time at the end of the thesis.

On average, writing a thesis takes 6 months and is not a very pleasant moment to live (see the commandment number 3). It is therefore necessary to prepare yourself better to make things as easy as possible.

Following the previous period, it is better to define and decide on your scientific contributions before starting to write. This is not always possible with experiments or late implementation and in this case you will experience the end of the results and the beginning of the writing in parallel. Nevertheless, when you think about your thesis manuscript, you must have clear ideas about what you want to put in it, what you want to tell.

No matter what, there will be a time when you will shit to the writing of your thesis, and it is quite possible that you will see that time coming, perhaps even have a date set in stone with your supervisor a few weeks in advance. It is important to be aware of this moment and to prepare it well, especially physically. This means a lot of sleep beforehand in order to start writing your thesis in the best conditions, especially because we usually start writing with the state of the art, which is not fun and can even be mentally exhausting. And even if you have prepared yourself and are in good shape for the transition to writing, remember that thesis writing is a long process (again, see commandment number 3).

Once you start writing, there will come a time when you will see the end of the thesis coming, and maybe even have time to think about the aftermath. For these two phases, find the pages dedicated to the end as well as to the after.

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