10 Steps to a 1,0 Master Thesis

This post was written together with Garima Singh, part of the Team BiG, who recently finished her Master Thesis in Heidelberg.

Chained to my desk for 6 months! Dark circles under my eyes! And a coffee addiction!

Yup! You guessed it right! Master Thesis!

Oh boy! This post is going to be a long one! I have created a PDF for the points that are not covered in this post. You can download it from this link: https://bharat-in-germany.ck.page/thesischecklist)

1. Be organized as hell

plan out everything in advance! Literally everything! Set deadlines for yourself! Make sure you punish yourself if you don’t meet the deadlines (don’t jump off of a building or hurt yourself). Just throw away something you like! Or buy your friend something with your money! That will quickly put your mind back to work! But on a serious note, make a calendar and stick to it. You should have a rough idea about when you should do what and how long you will do it for!

2. Research your topic BEFORE you register yourself

don’t start with the topic AFTER registering! You will spend 2 months just looking for a topic and making objectives and research questions. Plan in advance and search for your topic before registering! The way this works is that you either talk to your professor about a topic you are interested in and he gives you insights or you look up some journal articles and books to get a hang of things! But it’s important to know in advance what exactly you will try to achieve with your thesis. I researched for my topic ‘Brand concept information search in Consumer Decision Making Journey’, (sounds fancy! Doesn’t it?) for nearly a month before I registered myself at the examination office. All I can say is, I should have researched more because even though I had an idea what I wanted to do, I had no objectives!! A topic with no objectives makes no sense!

3. Talk to your professor/supervisor all the time

Confirm! Double confirm! Triple confirm! Quadruple confirm!! Things with your professor! Keep him in the loop! Always tell him what’s going on! That will help your professor to judge your performance based on how enthusiastic you were throughout your thesis. Ask him what he expects! Professors WANT to help you! BUT! And there’s a big BUT: You have to ASK your professor! Your professor doesn’t know that you have no idea what to do! And don’t feel embarrassed about asking! I asked my professor all sorts of weird things! Ask him if he can show you a sample master thesis! Talk about page limit, the graphs he prefers, the kind of analysis he wants to see!

4. Referencing side by side

I did my references side by side and I saved a lot of time! I mean YES! It’s irritating as hell! YES! It takes a lot of time! YES! It interrupts your line of thought! YES! You have to write it in some stupid Harvard style or something! YES! You have to scroll up and down the document to get the complete referencing! YES! Something the document is good but you can't cite it (because it is not academic literature)! YES! You need to have a ton of references (i had 5 pages!! Beat that sucker)! Wait!! Did I say doing them side by side is good? I’m not too sure anymore! Nah Just kidding! You can do it in a separate word file and arrange it in alphabetical order from the beginning (that’s of course if you know the correct sequence of the alphabets. You can also use a reference managing software like Menedely! Just make sure you do it and don’t leave it as an end task because by the time you are done writing, half of your references will be lost and you won’t be able to find them again.

5. Analysis

If you have to do an analysis, make sure you at least get the basics of the statistical tests and the software that you will use to do an analysis. YouTube is your friend!

Quick Tip

Have a dedicated diary or notebook! And as soon as you get an idea! WRITE THAT DOWN! I forgot to write some ideas down so many times because I was completing a line in a paragraph or something like that! Once a thought is gone! It’s gone forever!

6. Reading

You don’t have to do the reading in one go! Do it in parts! Read and write! Read and write! My professor told me this. He said ‘ Dear Ms. Singh. This is a master thesis, not a Ph.D. thesis’. He said that you should not get crazy about the topic! If you read too much then you can no longer think of the stuff you read in a systematic manner and you won’t be able to comprehend what you read

Word voice

Use this! So the thing is, when you are reading books and journals, and it has stuff that you can use in your writing, write it as a rough draft in Word! Wait, I mean you can speak it and word will write it for you. It saves time! I learned this from a fellow housemate, who read something and always wrote it down. I kinda skipped over it initially and then I forgot what I read and to re-read it!

I think I will wrap it up! I created a document with additional recommendations. You can download it at this link: https://bharat-in-germany.ck.page/thesischecklist and then you have it forever. But if you still have more questions (try to go through the PDF once) you can just write in the comment section.