Astronomy and the Prisoner of Bangladeshi Thesis

As some of you know, I am currently enrolled as an undergrad at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh majoring in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. But my area of interest is in astronomical data filtering, modelling and analysis. Specifically I worked on Transiting Exoplanets Data. Defending my thesis felt like navigating Mirpur's legendary roads: every step jolted by unexpected potholes, but somehow I still reached the destination. I'll be sharing my journey in this blog and may eventually suggest you some dos and don'ts if you are planning to take a thesis on astronomy from Bangladesh from an engineering background.

Selecting Supervisor

If you are an engineering student and hoping to do your thesis in astronomy, GOOD LUCK! 😪 In Bangladesh, many undergraduates don't get the opportunity to propose their own problem statement or work on their area of interest. Sometimes, the thesis supervisor is assigned by lottery and you must work on whatever topic they choose without much say in the matter.

But if you do get a choice (and you must create one) then choose a supervisor who is flexible, empathetic and allows you freedom in your research. Here's what worked for me: I immersed myself in research papers on a specific field of astronomy namely exoplanets and prepared a presentation summarizing the literatures and a potential problem statement. I then approached my supervisor with this, showing my passion and progress with regular updates. I was fortunate enough that my dedication paid off and he agreed to supervise my work on exoplanets.

Readings

After you have finalized your area of interest, the next step is to read the related literatures. One thing is you can search related papers on Google Scholar or on NASA ADS or you can directly ask LLMs like Perplexity AI to give you the related papers. For this specific task, Perplexity works better than ChatGPT in my experience.

❌ Don't: Read research papers at your infancy. You will not understand most of the jargons and it'll make you feel like you are not cut out for this.
✅ Do: Read thesis books on related topics. They are usually written in a more beginner-friendly way and will help you understand the basics of the field.

Track Progress

Most students start their thesis when the defense date is knocking at the door. It's a very bad practice. Present your progress (even if it's small) to your supervisor on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Create a project tracker on google docs to keep the meeting minutes and related suggestions from your supervisor.

Note down important lines and equations from papers and books in Obsidian. Obsidian allows to manage your writings in a more structured way and you can implement LaTex codes or markdown formatted texts in this software. And guess what? This software is free and open-source!

Reference Management

Use a reference management tool like Zotero or Mendeley to keep track of your references. It will save you a lot of time and effort when writing your thesis. I personally used Mendeley and it worked great for me.

Visualization

I am assuming that you'll use python for your astronomy research. Use libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn for data visualization. Make the images look academic and professional. You can follow this video to create publication-ready figures: Principles of Beautiful Figures for Research Papers and How to Create Beautiful Research Figures (Complete Tutorial) Save the figures in pdf format for better quality and smaller file size. You should be careful that, if the figures are too large, Overleaf may not compile your LaTex codes. To create or modify diagrams you can use Inkscape, a free and open-source vector graphics editor.

Don't Lose Hope!

As Emily Dickinson beautifully wrote, hope is the thing with feathers. It is important to recognize that many people around you may not understand or appreciate your work. There is a real possibility that the topic you are currently developing, with the aspiration to publish, may already have been explored. You might even discover that a new publication closely resembling your research is released just before your defense. Even in the face of these discouragements, even if they mock your work during your defense - resist the urge to give up. Persevere and hold onto your hope.

"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist