Thesis Acknowledgements: 13 Real‑World Examples

Two hundred pages of argument, and the page that stops you is the one where you just say thank you.

There’s no rubric for it, and it’s one of the very few parts of a thesis you write as yourself rather than as a researcher. So you stall, reach for a generic template, and end up with something that sounds like nobody. The samples you’ll find elsewhere don’t help much, because most of them are invented: made-up students thanking made-up professors.

So we went looking for real ones instead. Below are thirteen acknowledgements pages from the published dissertations we host in full, quoted exactly as written, each one linking to the thesis it came from. They run from the strictly professional to the warmly personal, so you can go straight to the register you want and see how somebody has already pulled it off.

If you want the mechanics first, who goes in and in what order, start with our guide to writing the acknowledgements section.

Who to thank first

The acknowledgements section is where you thank the people who helped you finish. Almost all of them move through the same four groups, running from the most formal to the least.

Your advisor usually leads, because they guided the work and may well be examining it. Family and friends usually come last, however much they carried you.

One common exception: where a study has human participants, many researchers thank them first, ahead of the committee. Example 12 below does exactly that.

It’s usually optional, and it sits in the front matter near the abstract. Exactly where varies more than you’d expect: UNC and the University of Illinois put it straight after the abstract and before the table of contents, while the University of Utah puts it last, after the lists of tables and figures. Check your own graduate school’s format guide before you place it.

Strictly professional

Start at the formal end. These four stay inside the working circle and get off the page fast: no family, no reflection, nothing about what the degree taught anyone.

If your department is dry, or you simply want this written today and off your list, borrow one of these shapes.

Example 1: A three-sentence page

Seventy words, three sentences, and the page is finished. It’s the shortest of the thirteen and it’s still complete: committee, then lab, then the six undergraduates who ran the data collection, all by name. Of the thirteen, this is the one I’d hand to somebody who wanted to be finished by lunchtime.

Undergraduate assistants are the easiest group to forget, and they’re often the ones who did the hours. If anybody collected or coded data for you, name them.

Example 2: One verb, six reasons

Four of its six sentences open with “I thank”, and it still doesn’t drag, because every one of them names a different group and a different reason. That’s worth knowing if you’re worried about repeating yourself: keep the verb, change the reason.

Look at who gets in. Coauthors, anonymous reviewers, and the participants who sat through studies the page itself calls “sometimes dull”. Most drafts stop at the supervisors.

Example 3: Thanking your examiners

Hardly anybody thinks of this one.

Your examiners read the whole thing more closely than anyone else ever will, and their questions improved it. The chair kept the defense, or viva, civil. None of them expects to be thanked, which is why it lands.

You can only write it after your defense, which is usually fine: the copy you deposit at the end is the post-defense one, and the front matter is the part nobody thinks to revisit.

Example 4: Acknowledging funding properly

Name the award, the body behind it, and the years it covered. This one does it twice, and either sentence on its own would satisfy a funder checking that the condition was met.

Some awards specify the exact wording in their terms, so check before you write your own.

The middle ground

Most acknowledgements sections land in the middle: professional in shape, with a person visible in it. What separates these five from filler is that each one names something specific that somebody actually did.

Example 5: The master’s version

Advisor, committee, family, finished.

That’s the whole structure, and for a master’s thesis it’s plenty. Four of its adjectives are doing no work at all: unwavering, unyielding, steadfast, unending. The line you remember is the plain one, “I will miss our weekly meetings”, because it’s the only sentence in there that could only have been written about this advisor. Trade two adjectives for one detail like that and the page changes.

Example 6: When the first topic collapsed

Two people get thanked for one specific act: finding a new topic when the first proposal fell through. That says more than a paragraph of gratitude would, because it names what they actually did.

A line manager and a personal tutor turn up as well. That’s what support looks like when you’re studying around a job, and no template has a slot for it. A boss who moved your shifts around belongs on this page as much as a committee member does.

Example 7: A chair who took you in

Changing chairs partway through happens more often than a finished thesis ever shows, and it leaves you with an awkward page to write.

This is what graceful looks like: name what happened in a clause (“I came to you in a time of great need”), thank the person who caught you, then move straight on to the methodology help. No explanation, no score-settling, nothing an outsider could reconstruct.

Example 8: Naming the self-doubt

Self-doubt gets one clause here, and then the page moves on. That’s the trick if you want to be honest about how hard it was: say it plainly, credit the person who helped you through it, and don’t dwell.

A paragraph on the same subject turns the page into a diary. A clause reads as candid.

Example 9: Interviewees as co-creators

The opening line is doing real work, which is rare.

A lot of them open with a throat-clear (“I would like to thank…”), and this one skips it. Notice what the people studied get called: expert co-creators as well as data providers. Naming the first half is a choice, and it’s open to anybody who did fieldwork.

Warm and personal

The other end of the spectrum, for anybody who wants the page to sound like themselves.

These four thank people the university never sees: a husband, a faith, a room full of participants, an advisor quoted back at himself. All four were accepted exactly as they are, and two of them are funnier than you’d expect a thesis to be.

Example 10: Opening with faith

God first, then family, then the advisor. That order is completely normal in much of the world.

If faith belongs in your acknowledgements, put it where this writer put it. Nobody marks the front matter on theology.

Example 11: The part-time student

Written by somebody studying around a full-time job, and it shows in who gets thanked first: the husband who lost every weekend to it, ahead of the supervisor.

That breaks the convention further down this page, and it was accepted anyway. Read it as evidence that the order is a norm rather than a rule, and that a page which is plainly true to its writer survives bending one.

Example 12: Participants first

If your study had human participants, they have a real claim to the first line, and this one gives it to them.

It also sounds like nobody else could have written it. Dolly and Kenny on a hot August night in Benham, Kentucky is not a sentence a template produces, and it tells you something about that fieldwork the methodology chapter never will.

Example 13: Quoting your advisor back

The only one of the thirteen that quotes somebody out loud, and to my mind the best line in the set: “if we had all the answers, there wouldn’t be any research”.

If your advisor said something you still repeat to yourself, use their words instead of an adjective. “Generous with their time” tells your examiner nothing. One remembered sentence tells them everything.

Things to avoid

Four ways this page goes wrong. The first one has consequences past your grade; the rest are matters of judgment.

Naming participants you promised to anonymize. If your consent form said your participants wouldn’t be identifiable, thanking “the eight nurses on Ward 4 at [hospital]” can undo that in a single sentence, and it can undo it for the whole study. Thank them as a group, with no identifying detail.

Thanking your family before your advisor. Nobody will fail you for it, but the order gets read as a signal, and your advisor is the person most likely to open the page. If your family genuinely carried the project, say so warmly. Just not first.

Leaving out a funder. Your thesis counts as a resulting publication, so read the terms of your award instead of guessing.

Making it a comedy set. A light touch reads well, as Kowe Kadoma’s does above. A page of in-jokes reads differently a decade later, when the thesis is still sitting in the repository and you’re applying for jobs.

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Free template

If you’d rather start from a structure than a blank page, we’ve built a free, fully editable template covering the standard content of a thesis or dissertation acknowledgements section. Download a copy here, then write the sentences in your own words.

Still have questions?

How do I write an acknowledgement for my thesis?

List everyone who helped, then sort that list from the most formal relationship to the most personal. Write a sentence or two for each, and make at least a few of them specific to what that person actually did for you. Then cut it back until nothing is left that you wouldn’t say out loud.

How long should a thesis acknowledgement be?

There’s no standard. Of the thirteen sections these extracts come from, the shortest is 70 words and the middle one about 240, with the longest several times that again. Every one of them was accepted. Write until you’ve thanked the people who helped, then stop.

Do acknowledgements count toward the word limit?

Usually not: front matter is commonly excluded from the count. But that’s set by your department’s regulations rather than by convention, and the regulations are the only place to check. The same goes for whether the section is allowed at all.

Is the acknowledgements section compulsory?

Usually not. All three of the format guides linked above list it as optional, though yours is the one that counts. A thesis without acknowledgements is perfectly normal, and nobody will mark you down for it.

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