Worried about failing my defense based on running my own stats and a very rough draft of thesis
I have been working on and writing my master’s thesis for months, but my advisors were very slow (almost 2 months) on getting initial edits on my chapters and that put me in the situation of having to add data and heavily edit/add information into my thesis in the last two weeks. I basically had to double my word count, run stats, and add data in a week and a half and then send it to my committee.
Now, I did my best the 95% confidence intervals on my data are insanely high (even for a couple of significant results) and it’s making me nervous that I’ve run the stats incorrectly or that the amount of uncertainty we’re seeing is making our findings unusable. I have to defend this in a week and I’m so terrified that I won’t pass and the career opportunity is going to fall through.
I sent all my stats to my advisors months ago and they never looked at them until they noticed when I sent them my chapter draft that I was using the wrong CIs a week and a half ago and that’s why I had to rush the stats. My advisors had the draft of my thesis (did not express any concern) and approved it to go to my committee, but I’m not sure how much that’ll really means.
TLDR:
I kinda don’t trust myself and I’m worried about failing defense/examination and ruining my life because of rushed work.
(Also I’m not blaming anyone but myself, some of the research lagged and I’ve had some personal stuff going on and I recognize my advisors are also super busy)
Basically, does anyone have suggestions of what, if anything, I can do to be better prepared? Or shine any light on the defense process?
Should I bring up my concerns to my advisors before the defense or is that frowned upon?
I’m a very honest person and I’m not sure if I should be honest about my concerns about stats being not quite right during the actual defense, like I’m planning to rerun all the stats and adjust the everything accordingly should I say that?
How likely is this to impact my chances?
Any advice is very, very appreciated!
Posted Jun 11, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC