Thesis Writing Guide/Introduction

Abstract

% Context:
Writing a scientific bachelor or master thesis is complicated and only really understood after submission. Having these lessons learned available at the start of a thesis could lower the burden of writing it.

% Objective:
This guide is designed to wrap these lessons learned with best practices for every step of the thesis. It aims to be helpful to any reader looking to write a good bachelor/master thesis, from software setup over writing to final publication.

% Method:
This guide structures advice commonly given in everyday thesis supervision, alongside open subsections to compliment with individual experience at a very low threshold. First, the Introduction provides an overview over what this guide can and cannot do, preparing the reader to start with their thesis. The Setup represents the step 0, discussing aspects relevant before writing the first word or starting the first experiment. Work is in progress. Likely the most extensive section is Writing, detailing many different chapters and how to fill them with relevant, high-quality content. This written artefact is then submitted for Publication, a closing chapter handling everything after the final word was written.

% Result:
Since this guide is currently in the making, we don't have any noteworthy results beyond what the reader may find in the book. If the guide persists and is adopted to everyday academic supervision and writing, we see potential to replace this placeholder paragraph with a success story of how sharing knowledge helped everyone. To make this work, please use and share the book and contribute to the lesson learned sections. Contributing to the other sections or Discussion is also welcome.

% Conclusion:
This guide wraps lessons learned to write a bachelor or master thesis. It is a living document, used and extended in everyday academia. While not complete yet, it may help already, and invites for collaboration.

Specifics

How your specific thesis should and will look like depends on

• Region (e.g. Lower Saxony, Germany)
• Institution (e.g. Leibniz Universität Hannover)
• Faculty (e.g. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
• (Sub)department (e.g. Data Science and Digital Libraries)
• Evaluator/Supervisor (e.g. your Professor)
• Time (e.g. 2024)

This guide attempts to unify all universal guidelines, while individual rules are separeted into modules:

• Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibnitz Universität Hannover

Formal Organization

Then you need check a few boxes before your thesis can start:

1. Get thesis admission
2. Find the right supervisor (and evaluators)
3. Settle on an assignment, preferably written out as a one-pager
4. Find a thesis title, preferably agreed upon by you, your supervisor and every evaluator
5. Register your thesis

This section will guide you through all of those steps.

Get thesis admission

Usually, you need to complete a certain set of requirements to sign up for a bachelor or master thesis. To ensure you have satisfied them, contact your examination office and get an admission sheet for your thesis (this may vary between institutions).

It is highly advised to complete the formal registration before step 2 and 3, to avoid conflict with the examination regulations.

Finding a topic & supervisor

Sadly, this guide has little to suggest for finding the right topic and supervisor. In an ideal world, there would be a marketplace like ebay, where any supervisor just lists their topics and any student just goes shopping until they find something, potentially even raising their own requests for topics. In reality, only few alternatives can be discussed in this subsection.

General advice

• You can search preemptively to get a feeling for what topics are available, even half a year before you actually start.
• When you contact a potential supervisor, make sure to
  • make clear where you are in your studies and when you plan to start your thesis,
  • provide a curriculum vitae (CV) and a transcript of results, alongside three short sentences describing what you're interested in,

so they can provide you with a mutually beneficial answer.

Departments

While you study, you will listen to different subjects. If one is particularly interesting, just contact the lecturer and ask if they have topics available.

Online

If you're interested in a subject, you can just search for it on the internet, especially on dedicated science platforms like Google Scholar. If you search for the name of a few professors you know, you may find what they generally work on, and whom you could approach.

Other universities

Technically, even professors at other universities could be your evaluator, depending on your university rules. Make sure to get clearance at your own university before you approach the external professor.

Formalize an assignment

It is advised to formalize an assignment before you start your thesis. This assignment could look as follows:

Motivation
Writing a scientific bachelor or master thesis is complicated and only really understood after submission. Having these lessons learned available at the start of a thesis could lower the burden of writing it.

Goal
The goal is to design a guide that makes this experience accessible to bachelor and master thesis students while writing their thesis. The guide needs to be openly available, expandable and provide general advice applicable to different topics and domains.

Approach

The guide will be written by crowdsourcing previous experience of several pre-selected student thesis supervisors, all of whom have written and supervised bachelor or master theses before. During the writing process, the guide will be available online and open for feedback and collaboration. To validate this guide, it will be offered to several students during their thesis. These students will use and asses the usability of the guide and provide feedback in a semi-structured interview. This feedback will be evaluated and summarized to formulate recommendations to further improve the guide.

This assignment has several benefits:

• It serves as an anchor point so you and your supervisor always know the goals of your thesis, which is especially helpful when some time has passed since you settled upon it.
• It is basically identical to what you need to write either way in your introduction chapter. You're not doing additional work here, you're front-loading future work.
• It serves as a ground truth between you and your supervisor. When your thesis starts, your supervisor will likely know more about your topic than you do, but eventually, that will likely flip as you invest months into a specific topic. This clear write-out gives you a stepping stone to easier understand what their keywords might mean, especially compared to just a short title. This greatly reduces the risk of a rude awakening when the title is "solving the moving sofa problem" turns out to be a 50+ year old complex problem.

However, some points require consideration:

• The approach should be formulated that it provides a clear, but not too binding guideline. For example, if the number of participants was predefined to, say, 20 students, and only 15 are found, it would put an unnecessary burden upon the thesis. Always read the assignment top to bottom again to spot those pitfalls early on. However, these qualifiers also provide structure, so providing too blurry of a definition (e.g. "The guide will be evaluated.") provides little benefit either. Find a good balance with your supervisor.

Formulate a title

The title of your thesis should

• be as short as possible and as long as necessary
• reflect the assignment in a few key words
• be something you want to list in your CV later
• not change throughout your entire thesis process

All of those are guidelines, and there are always exceptions. The most important thing is that you and your supervisors agree upon the title.

Register your thesis

Once you have your thesis

• admission,
• supervisor and evaluators,
• assignment,
• and title,

you can finally register it. This also sets the date of your final submission. Be sure to register as soon as you have settled on a title, again, to avoid conflict with the examination regulations.

Look ahead

Now you don't need to worry about formalia, your thesis lies ahead of you. Some points are raised now to avoid confusion later.

Submission

The submission date is defined once you register. Shifting it to the future is sometimes possible, e.g. if unforeseen events delayed progress through no fault of your own. Always contact your examination in that case.

Specifics of submission requirements vary by departments, be sure to check Specifics for details. If that section does not provide any applicable to you, ask your supervisor to add them there, or do it yourself after you've asked them.

Presentation

In many cases, a thesis is concluded by a presentation. This presentation, sometimes called defense, may be evaluated, sometimes even graded, again, depending on your department specific regulations. Later in this book, this presentation will receive a dedicated chapter, for now keep one thing in mind:

While writing, remember that you eventually need to present this thesis to a room of people who may know little about your topic.
If you can, create graphics and visualizations that illustrate what you want to talk about as you write your thesis.
You will be able to use them twice, in your written thesis and in your presentation.

This saves you from having the prefect image that could have shined on your first page of your approach section, but only during preparation for your presentation slides, long after you've already submitted the written thesis.

Lessons Learned: Introduction

Dear reader, this is your time to shine!

Contribute your own lessons learned, add helpful hints and mistakes made so that others may learn from it.
Just click "edit" and add your own subsection!