Planning a thesis

Yesterday I attended a workshop at Leeds University to help me plan my transfer document for my doctorate research. It's always an interesting situation to be the student rather than the tutor - I guess that it gives me some empathy with what the students on my programmes may be feeling. We were informed that there were three things that the assessors would be looking for as they sought to be sure that the proposed research (and researcher) had potential to progress to the full doctoral research stage. Those three things considered originality, independent critical ability and the publishable nature of the work. But the thing that I want to explore here is that concept of potential.

Students who access our learning programmes work their way through eight taught modules to gain their postgraduate diploma - and that's a significant piece of work by itself. Just like Leeds however, we then make a decision on the potential of each student to progress to the final MSc thesis stage. It's not automatic. And it's an area that can seem quite daunting as well.

At the start of the process we ask you what you are thinking about researching for your thesis. I have had discussions with many students at our annual three day summer school about their options and what this could look like. But getting the scope right is still challenging. It has to be a piece of work over which the student has control - if necessary you must be able to respond to how the study develops. It has to add something to the knowledge base (often a challenge for those in the industry who are reluctant to publish their work and service improvements) and it has to be something that you can do and write up within 12 months.

Our approach in Manchester is to ask you to submit your proposal. This covers your outline literature review and your project plan. It allows us to assess where your work sits in the wider context and evidence base and to make a judgment over whether it is achieveable within the timescale. We may suggest amendments, we may recommend that you consider something else or we may simply give the go ahead. Whichever option we take however, our intention is to support the student. We want our students to excel and so our comments and guidance are all there to help you in this process.

A thesis is a big piece of work. It is worth doing and it's worth shouting about when you have submitted it and gained your result. I'm marking two theses at the moment and it's great to see the work, discipline and hard effort that has gone in to them. I will be able to let you know the outcomes after our external examiners meet in November.