Acknowledging major disruptions in your thesis

You may have needed to significantly alter your research plan due to major disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In some cases, this may mean that the thesis you submit is not typical for your discipline.

Your discussion in the thesis of COVID-19 or other impacts will guide the examiners’ understanding of the reported work and the environment in which you undertook it.

In your thesis, you should discuss any methodological changes you have made and explain how the changes resulted because of the disruptions.

Theses usually also include a discussion of possible future research. You may wish to outline research that could be done under different conditions.

You should consult with your supervisors and advisory committee chair to decide what approach suits your situation best.

What to include or exclude

When you include statements within your thesis, other than in the Acknowledgements, they must be objective and within the scope of matters that examiners consider.

You can include statements about the impact of significant external disruptions such as COVID-19 on matters such as:

• The scope of the thesis
• Experimental design
• Access to resources, including facilities, collections, cohorts of experimental subjects, fieldwork, laboratories and performance spaces.

This list is indicative only. If in doubt, contact your supervisors or advisory committee chair about other relevant inclusions.

It is not appropriate to include:

• Emotional statements
• How your experience compared to others (examination is not competitive)
• Impacts (such as the need to work remotely)
• Personal statements on mental or physical health, family or finances
• The behaviour or availability of supervisors.

While these factors may have had a profound impact on you during the disruptions, there is no concept of ‘special consideration’ in the examination of theses.

Challenges to candidature are expected to be managed prior to submission and are not considered by examiners. For example, if access to supervisors was a difficulty, alternative arrangements should have been made. The University does not expect examiners to make allowance for such factors.

Major changes to the project

If the disruptions led to significant changes to your project, you should address this in a single location.

For example, you might include a section that addresses the impact the disruptions had on the entire thesis, or on multiple chapters within the thesis in a systematic and explicit way.

The introduction is where candidates lay out the thesis for examiners and provides an opportunity to present objective statements regarding the impact of major disruptions on the thesis. If the disruptions meant you pursued different methodologies in different parts of the thesis, the introduction is a good place to explain why in a cohesive way.

Alternatively, you can add statements to the preface, to provide context to the work as a whole.

You could use a final conclusions chapter to summarise the work and outline future research opportunities. If the disruption prevented you from undertaking particular research activities, this section can highlight gaps in the study and suggest how they might be addressed.

Carefully explaining how the disruption shaped the methodology demonstrates your capacity to think beyond your current study/degree and to adapt to changing conditions. It can show that you are creative, flexible and exploratory as a problem-solver.

The skills expected of a strong candidate include the ability to formulate a viable research question and to analyse information critically within and across a changing disciplinary environment.

You can still demonstrate these attributes, even if the investigative component of the research has been impeded. Remember that the core goal is research training, not the achievement of specific research outcomes.

Impact on specific chapters

If the disruptions impacted just one or two chapters of your thesis, they still need to stand alone as quality research.

One option is to explain the original design and how you revised it, either in the chapter introduction or in the section where it best fits in your narrative.

It is important to explain to the examiners why you chose that methodology, particularly if it is unusual for your discipline. For example, the disruption may have affected the number or type of interviews that you conducted or may have forced you to change from experimental work to computational modelling.

Again, writing a focused discussion of the impact of the disruptions on a specific piece of work is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the qualities and skills that an examiner seeks in a strong candidate.

If a major disruption like COVID-19 affected your research, your thesis can still demonstrate strong research skills, judgement and adaptability. By clearly explaining how these disruptions affected your research, you can help examiners understand the context of your work without detracting from its quality.