I’m approaching my MSc thesis right now and had a day of ‘how to approach / write it’ workshops yesterday. I am now much happier now the lid has been lifted off and some of the worms in the can have been identified / explained. I have a basic question, a proposed methodology as an approach and I have started all of this early so have time (currently) on my side.

What top tips have you got? Help me learn from your mistakes so I can reduce my own.

Writing a thesis is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman, TooTall.

You’ve got to sharpen your pencil…

I’ll stop there, actually. 🙂

A revision timetable is the way forward

😆

TooTall – what subject area? MSc dissertations can either be ‘wordy’ or ‘numerical’, so advice depends in part on what subject area you’re working on.

From previous lecturing experience, there’s a couple of common points of advice:

– focus your question (one of the biggest challenges is actually getting a proper research question, which isn’t too vague)

– keep the scope manageable – remember it’s a Masters, not a PhD!

– leave a lot of time for writing up – even things like getting your reference lists written up correctly can take more time than you expect.

Good luck, and enjoy it! Research can be fun 🙂

CFH – either you’re never done a MSc dissertation or made love to a beautiful woman … or if you have and you draw that comparison, you were doing one of them very, very wrong 😯

What’s the area TooTall? In mine (chemistry) you would start with the data and have that in order as that’s the foundation stone of the work.

Also, what sort of assessment process will it go through? The MSc theses I’ve examined have all been just me reading them and assigning a pass / fail / distinction – so no oral examination. This will have some influence on how you go about writing it.

i have nothing constructive to say

*waves*

*Hopes Sue realises that I wasn’t being even slightly serious….*

Environmental and Energy Studies. I am taking an established assessment methodology and using it in a new area because that new area should be viewed in the same way as the existing area – or at least in a similar way. So, in taking a well-proven methodology and using it to test subjects in two representative environments (one old, one new), I hope to prove, or disprove, my proposal. So, structured social with some simple data logging (internal temp, external temp, lux levels) as an approach.

CFH … and there was me thinking everything on STW was an accurate reflection of reality 😉

TooTall – OK. I used to lecture in environmental politics / policy, so not completely dissimilar.

As a marker, I was often looking for the following:

– clear, focused question

– rationale / justification for the hypothesis

– good balanced lit review

– clear methodology and data presentation

– discussion which links back to the research q, hypothesis, and data findings.

– conclusion which indicates – key findings; contribution to the existing body of research on this topic; suggestions for further research.

TBH, at Masters level, no-one is expecting you to be producing the next Nobel prize level of work, but to show that you have grasped the fundamentals of undertaking a research project (on a mini-scale) from start to completion.

😀 Phew!

quality not quantity would be my tip.

My MEng thesis/dissertation was supposed to be 60,000 words. I handed in 27,000 and got a 1st

Others slavishly adhered to the word count, and got crap marks because they had waffled.

Dave

As a former Academic Librarian I feel duty bound to add – please note all your references, in the correct form of citation, as you do the research. Use some software if you must, there are loads of free ones that will format the citation correctly for you. Thank you.

mendeley – http://www.mendeley.com/