Writing a Dissertation Acknowledgment
What to Mention in the Dissertation Acknowledgment
After the innumerable nights spent burning the midnight oil to write your dissertation, the dissertation acknowledgment must seem like a breeze. But just in case you muck it up in a last minute dash for meeting the submission deadline, here’s a handy guide.
One great parallel for the exhilaration one feels on completing the draft of a dissertation is the experience of winning an Oscar. At the Oscar ceremony, when you see the awardees come up on stage notice that while they are swept up by the moment, they pause to thank the people who got them there, because it could be a chance of a lifetime to put in words the gratitude one has always felt in one’s heart. Hence, in this section you acknowledge everyone who helped you complete your dissertation. Remember to thank the following people at least:
-Your guide or supervisor for steering you towards insightful references and for being your sounding board (mention them first in the dissertation acknowledgment)
- Person(s) who first sparked your interest in the research problem and thus inspired the course of your dissertation’s work.
- People, apart from your supervisor, who made suggestions or comments that helped to gain a different perspective to the research problem
- Your respondents for taking the time to help you collect data so that you could obtain tenable results. A lot of people forget to do this, which is unfortunate. The people who respond to your questions have nothing to benefit from doing so; it’s just their support for research and your objectives that make them take out the time to enhance your understanding of a problem.
- Your parents for feigning interest in your topic when you raved about it over dinner table conversations and for understanding when you couldn’t come home for the holidays because you had to submit a draft.
- Anyone who stayed up with you while you were writing the dissertation and made sure you had plenty to eat and drink.
A tip for the dissertation acknowledgment section is to think about the key challenges that you faced while writing the dissertation and how you superseded them. That way, your acknowledgments will be more specific; For instance, “I would like to thank Prof. ABC, who was kind enough to suggest the empirical models I could use for analyzing intra-regional trade in primary products, in order to study trends over the past decade and detect significant breakaway points. He also helped demystify a lot of jargon surrounding these models for me and explained how to use them in a simple, clear manner.”
Also, remember to take full responsibility for any possible errors in your dissertation, even in those areas where others have helped you. For instance, “While I am grateful to Prof. ABC for his assistance, I must clarify that the blame for errors in the empirical analysis (if any) lies with me alone.”
Do take a look at the dissertation acknowledgment in our sample dissertation on outsourcing call center management.