❤ Love Letter to Your Thesis 2025 winners! ❤

This year we received 22 entries for this popular competition and the quality of these letters was excellent! Our judges had a hard time, but we finally have our five winners.

To everyone who submitted - thank you for your patience and hard work. We encourage all those who did not make it this year to try again in 2026.

We can’t wait to share the winning letters as well as a little about the authors with you! We have five winners this year under the following categories.

🤔 Wittiest Letter – Connor Dalby

🤝 Best Break-up Letter – Frances O’Leary

💕 Most Romantic – Zein Almaha Wahdan Oweis

🍋 Most Bittersweet – Anonymous!

🤩 Most Inspiring – Haley Sneed

Once again, many congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone for participating. Your letters were creative, genuine, and wonderful to read. We will share these letters with you over the next few weeks!

Here is the first winning letter:

Love Letter to Your Thesis 2025 Winners

Connor is a 2nd year MRC Precision Medicine PhD student, leveraging artificial intelligence techniques for Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics. Alongside pursuing a BSc in Psychology and MSc in Molecular Neuroscience, Connor routinely engaged in other creative pursuits such as writing, acting and directing for theatre and film. The Love Letter to Your Thesis competition was a fantastic challenge to apply creativity to the world of academia and thesis writing.

Dear Occam,

Listen, I am taking a break from writing my PhD thesis, and the uncontrollable weeping that ensues, to write you this letter because we have a score to settle, proverbial bones to pick and metaphorical beef to squash. You don't know me, but I know you - namely for your infamous quip "The simplest explanation/solution is the best."

On an almost daily occurrence, my supervisors and colleagues recommend your "razor" to cut away the complexity of my ideas and writing. To this, I bite my thumb at them - and at you. For my thesis is using artificial intelligence (complex) for Alzheimer's Disease (complex) in human populations (complex) - complex, complex complexities that I doubt you considered when coining your notorious phrase in ye olde 14th century. Indeed, the reconstruction of the human brain, generated by my AI model, has more holes, intersections and convolutions than the logic of your phrase. Such troubles have collimated into a routine of crying to the academic gods "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

My qualms are not with you alone, however. I am nauseated navigating contradictory advice such as "The early bird catches the worm" vs "Good things come to those who wait". Moreover, I find my thesis has never left my mind, even when out of sight, and never has my fondness grown in its absence.

Why then am I throwing my gauntlet at your feet specifically? Well, recently I experimented with two novel strategies. Firstly, I took upon rewriting the thesis from scratch, only containing the most absolutely essential points. Secondly, I changed a single value (from 0 to 1) in my AI model. From the former, my narrative has never been so razor-sharp and hard-hitting in its delivery. From the latter, all the previously mentioned holes are now stitched tight and my model's reconstruction of the human brain will undoubtedly become the envy of all my academic competitors. Both events occurred within a single day and the pure elation I experienced left me shy of crying 'Eureka!' and jumping out of my proverbial bathtub (office) with joy.

You now understand my feigned initial indignation and actual intent in writing this letter. It is to confess that, as much as it pains my large yet fragile academic ego, you were unequivocally right and I was undeniably wrong. I will say that once and once only - you heard me the first time. Indubitably, as is befitting of a PhD student, I will likely forget this whole debacle and disregard that which is good for me, opting to instead continue pushing this mighty rock up the mountain of misery that is thesis writing. Before this happens however, I wanted you to know that, at least on one occasion, your phrase and its inevitable veracity pulled me back from the brink of utter hysteria - and for that, I am forever indebted.

Anyway, I am off to go buy a set of mugs with motivational quotes embossed on their side and several self-help books...

Sincerely yours,

Connor