One of my favourite parts of dissertation season is reading the acknowledgements section – getting to dwell in the thanks to parents, friends, partners, children, lecturers, supervisors, the group chat, caffeinated drinks, the laptop that just about survived to deadline, and, of course, the students themselves.
Acknowledgements are a convention, and many are written because students feel this is what they should do. Still, something about them captivates me.
After six years of supervising undergraduates, I am of course pleased to be thanked. But it is the broader “poetry” of the section that draws me in, the generic “thank you for your support” woven between personal accounts of growth, love, grief, stubbornness and survival.
Just about still
Dissertation acknowledgements are written at the end of what has become, for many young people, a rite of passage – higher education study. This is a life chapter they have invested time, money, hope and stress into, and now another much less certain chapter is about to begin. The student is still a student, just. They are nearly a graduate, nearly beyond the timetables, deadlines, seminars, emails, library sessions and supervisory meetings that have organised so much of their life.
Written in this in-between space, acknowledgements ask students, however briefly, to look back across the whole journey. Who made this dissertation, and this degree, possible? What version of themselves did they have to become to get here?
Of course, not all acknowledgements are sincere. Sometimes the thanks read like an attempt to butter us up before marking. Sometimes the tone is so ambiguous that you cannot tell whether you or another person are being thanked, teased or quietly indicted.
Beyond conflict
For the marker, acknowledgements can produce conflicting feelings: joy that the student has reached this point, pride in what they have produced, and trepidation at marking something they have poured so much into. There can also be a sense of protectiveness towards someone about to leave university and enter a graduate labour market that does not exactly inspire confidence.
I am not sure it is possible to work closely with students at this stage of their higher education journey and feel nothing when reading their acknowledgements. Nor am I sure it is advisable to feel quite so much before the neutral process of marking. But as an educator, I experience that emotional muddle as a sign that higher education, and my role within it, has not yet been fully instrumentalised. There are still parts of the work that can be felt, that resist or at the very least evade metricisation.
While acknowledgement sections can give me some indication of how well I have undertaken my supervisory role, they also offer a broader glimpse of how students feel about their higher education journey. It is not clean, representative or anonymous feedback, but it captures something existing attempts at evaluation do not.
The relational experience
Universities ask students what they think through module evaluations, course committees, graduate outcomes and student satisfaction surveys. These are useful touchstones, though I do wonder what the logic is in asking final-year students about their satisfaction between January and April, as deadlines, dissertations and exams draw closer. Timing aside, we know that learning can be uncomfortable, and that student satisfaction is a complicated thing to capture, yet we still often ask students to translate a whole educational experience into the language of service quality. Was the teaching clear? Was feedback timely? Were resources available?
Acknowledgement sections are one of the few places where students describe – to someone at their higher education provider – how higher education has, for them, been a relational experience and not just a transactional one. They make visible some of the infrastructure of student success – sacrifice, encouragement, persistence and luck. With this in mind, we might also ask whether acknowledgements raise a less comfortable question about how often what students call “support” refers to staff going above and beyond – that is, doing work the institution has not properly recognised or resourced. Here, the thanks can feel powerful because it names that labour, and uncomfortable because this recognition is what staff get instead of pay or dedicated time for this work.
At a time when higher education is so often discussed through crisis — student numbers, staffing, value for money — dissertation acknowledgements remind us that the sector still creates forms of attachment, aspiration and transformation.
They are partial, emotional, performative and sometimes ridiculous. Acknowledgements can flatter, joke, wound and reveal. But at their best, they offer a glimpse of what higher education has meant to students, and why there is value in protecting it for those still to come.
