Asking our alumni: Insider tips on thriving during your master thesis process
IMME graduate Joe Hoffmann shares his tips on how to survive and thrive during the thesis writing process.
If you are reading this article, you are probably about to write your master thesis just as I was about one year ago. First of all, let me take your fears away: writing a master thesis is not witchcraft. And to make your life easier in the upcoming months, I have compiled a short list of some tips and experiences which I have gathered during my master thesis journey.
1. Take it step by step
Before starting to write, or conduct empirical research you need a clear plan of what you are going to do. Do not even think about writing a single word or creating a questionnaire before you have conducted literature research on your topic and have answered the following questions:
- What research gap do I want to fill with my thesis?
- What are my guiding research questions?
- How will I find answers to these questions?
Once you have made up your mind, you can start roughly scheduling your upcoming months. For example:
- In the first three weeks of May, I will create my questionnaire and gather literature.
- Until 7th June I want to have gathered my data and written the first draft of the theoretical background.
At the same time, make sure that you plan your upcoming week more in detail and always have short-term goals in mind.
2. Your secret weapon: A well-thought technical organization
The technical organization is one of the secrets of a well-written thesis. It takes some time to set it up, but believe me, you will thank me later. So what is technical organization? It is the way that you set up all your documents, references, notes and everything else that is related to your thesis. Whilst there are countless ways how to make sure you stay organized on the technical side let me give you some ideas on how I organized my thesis.
- Use a cloud storage service: To organize all my documents I used Google Drive. Not only does it offer the possibility to work on your thesis from every device, but it also makes sure that in case of your laptop breaking you still have access to all your files. It also makes sharing files much easier.
- Have a clear folder structure: When I was writing my thesis, I set up a folder for references, and under this folder had multiple subfolders grouping certain subtopics of my thesis. I also set up folders for models and notes. This structure made finding files much easier.
- Software: There are countless tools out there that facilitate your life so it would be a waste not to use them. Especially for organizing your literature, I can recommend you to use Citavi. It helps you to find, group, annotate all your literature and in the end, you can even use it to insert citations and the list of references with the right formatting into Word.
3. Continuous work pays off
Writing your thesis WILL NOT consume all the free time that you have. As long as you continually work on it from the start, you will be able to comfortably finish it in time without having to cancel your Netflix subscription. Just make sure to have set time slots during which you will work on your thesis and don’t forget to take breaks. Believe me when I say that the sentences that you write after working for more than a few hours will be worse than if you would've taken some breaks in between.
4. Don’t get lost in between your chapters
Whilst a thesis is separated into different parts, you need to make sure that the parts connect in a way that your thesis sharply explains and answers your research question.
- Don’t go too deep into topics during your theoretical background that you will never come back to during your discussion
- Open an interesting case in the introduction and make sure that you also come back to that case and give an answer to it during your discussion
- Don’t try to answer too many questions. Rather focus on a few but explain and answer them in detail.
5. Shared pain is half the pain
Just as with exams, having somebody else go together with you through hell can make it a bit more enjoyable. So if you know somebody else who is writing their thesis at the same time as you try to connect with them to share each other's pain. Even if your buddy is writing their thesis on a completely different topic, letting them comment on your work can always bring fresh ideas.
Thank you, Joe, for sharing your tips with us! We wish you all the best for the future and best of luck to those of you writing your thesis right now. Do you also have any advice to share with your fellow students? Send an e-mail to international.management@ovgu.de