Episode 56: Gill schreibt ihre Masterarbeit
In dieser Episode unseres Univlogs spricht Gill über einen, wenn nicht sogar den wichtigsten Teil des Studiums: Die Abschlussarbeit. Welche Erfahrungen hat sie gemacht und welche Tipps kann sie euch geben?
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Episode 56: Gill writes her Master’s thesis
In this episode of our Univlog, Gill talks about one of, if not the most important part of studying: the thesis. What experiences has she had and what tips can she give you?
Hi everyone, this is Gil, today I’d like to talk about a thesis. I finished my master thesis at the end of last year and I want to share my experience with the process. As you know very well, this is a very important aspect of concluding our academic journey, so let’s talk about the writing thesis process. Let’s go! The first very important thing is selecting a topic. It’s good to choose a topic that genuinely interests you or where you feel passionate while you’re studying. Perhaps you could do it by collaborating with other institutions or companies, enabling you to conduct in depths research on a narrow topic or narrow field or so. In these cases mostly the topic the main topic is already set. For gaining some ideas for your topic, you may refer a lot of published papers. There are some websites, such as elicit, research rabbit, Google Scholars, so read a lot and get some ideas and learn the structures. From this point on, I will show you the footage that captured my process and discuss them. After deciding on a topic, I conducted an initial literature review and wrote a research proposal. I sent the proposal to a professor whom I hoped would be my supervisor. At this stage, students might also choose a second supervisor. Following that, I needed to conduct a field work which in my case involved ethnographic research for 6 months at the company where I did my internship. Data collection can take various forms, such as experiments or fieldwork, depending on the research direction. I collected data through ethnographic research and an user experience survey. After collecting your own data, the next step is finally writing. Begin writing your thesis. Make sure to adhere to the structure and formatting guidelines provided by your department. In this part, I planned the details for the chapters and also divided the part as introduction, literature review, methodology, research, discussion and conclusion. At that time, I often felt lost and it was the most challenging period for me. During such times, I recommend navigating through it by maintaining appropriate communication with your supervisor or experienced peers. It seems like a period where a lot of support from those around you is very crucial. If I could go back to that time, I would probably allocate more effort to the communication aspect, aiming to shorten this challenging period and accelerate the overall process. Even though I did my best, struggling along didn’t really help me much. If the construction work was already completed, it’s definitely the time to start writing. I think I spent most of my time at the library during this period. I made a commitment to myself to write at least one to two pages every day and I dedicated the majority of my time to do it. Of course, it was very tough and, to be honest, there were many days when I couldn’t keep my promise. Some days, the writing felt good but there were many days when I just couldn’t do it. There were the days when I wanted to delete everything I had written. It was a period of exhaustion as I went through the cycle of deleting and rewriting multiple times. Strangely, as time has passed, I have come to realized that studying hard at the library until it closed during that time has become a good memory. Maybe this was the probably one of the small achievements I felt during this long process. Or so I sometimes felt very overwhelmed writing my thesis because I worked as a working student for 18 hours per week but 0:04:55.160,1193:02:47.295 nevertheless I had to keep pushing through. And now, when your thesis is finally completed, you should also include a binding process in your timeline. I had to go through two binding processes due to typos. I learned that this task is also very important, so plan and pull time for it. And finally it’s time to drop it. Put the two copies in the third envelope so that it will drop it off and be proud of yourself. It was great to share my thesis process with you today. If you have any tips, please share.