The Sentence That Rewrote My Thesis

My transfer viva was in October. The one line summary from the examiners was that my work had been on the lines of an industry report rather than a scientific contribution. It is not a pleasant thing to hear three years in, and it was correct.

The temptation in that moment is to fix the writing. Add hedging, add citations, make the register more academic and hope the underlying shape passes. I spent about a fortnight circling that option before admitting it would not survive a real examination either.

What actually changed was the unit of analysis. Until then I had been evaluating the XR experience: does a design review in virtual reality help people see things they missed in 2D? That question produces good industrial evidence and weak scientific evidence, because the answer is obviously yes and the interesting part is elsewhere. The interesting part is whether a mechanical design engineer can build one of these experiences themselves, and what it costs them to learn.

Stop evaluating the experience. Start evaluating its creation.

That reframing forced a second decision I resisted for weeks: scoping down. I had four templates I wanted in the study. After the first session of the new experiment it was clear that comparing four tools would produce noise, so the design narrowed to a single mixed reality template compared across two situational contexts, supervised and unsupervised. Fewer variables, a real comparison, and a result I can defend.

The experiment ran from the fifth of November to the third of December. Six focus groups, fourteen supervised authoring sessions, thirteen unsupervised ones, roughly three terabytes of video and 360 footage, and a task load form filled in after every single step. The analysis will take months. But for the first time the thing being measured is the thing the field keeps assuming.

If there is a lesson for anyone else doing an industry co-funded PhD, it is this. Harsh feedback about the category of your work is usually not feedback about your writing. Check whether you are measuring the obvious thing before you rewrite a single paragraph.