First, I am happy you are considering writing your thesis with me. A bachelor’s or master’s thesis or an internship is an excellent opportunity to get to know a research group and get a first impression of working in academia. In fact, this will likely be one of the first times you will be working on a research project that is not directly related to your studies. As a thesis student, you are the researcher and responsible for the project. My role as a supervisor is to support you, help you with your research, and guide you through writing a thesis. Other than in a lecture, you have to at least partially define the scope of your project yourself. To help me understand your progress, I will ask you to prepare our meetings in a standardized way (see below).
Exposé
Before we start working together, I would like you to write an exposé about your thesis. This proposal should summarize the following:
- the research question that you want to answer,
- why this is an important question,
- the state of the art,
- the methods that you want to use to answer your research question,
- and finally a minimal result and your anticipated results on a high level (1-2 pages).
Furthermore, please include a timeline for your project with essential milestones you will need to reach. The exposé should be formatted like a scientific paper (you can use the template provided in student starter kit) and a properly formatted bibliography. This helps avoid communication problems and misunderstandings about your topic and will later be a valuable resource to keep track of your progress and structure your thesis.
Shared Folder
When you start a thesis with me, I will create a shared Google Drive folder. It will be your job to keep this folder updated and include all relevant files we are working on in there. Within this folder, there should be one master document named <YOUR_NAME>_<YOUR_PROJECT_NAME> that contains an index with an explanation of folder structure, your start and end dates, and a link to your exposé, also placed in the shared folder. Also, there should be one protocol file that will be updated continuously by you and me and serves as ground of discussion in our meetings.
Structuring of Meetings
For our meetings, please prepare the following:
- Questions that you have the latest 1h before the meeting at the top of the protocol file
- A short written summary (can be a document, can be a presentation) of your progress since the last meeting
- Relevant screenshots, plots, figures A clear and structured preparation will help us make the most of our meetings. This also helps you to keep track of your progress and to stay motivated – use your weekly summaries to write your thesis. I highly recommend reading this blog post about successful meetings to make the most out of our meetings.
Writing a Thesis
In the general case, regardless of your study program, the thesis will be written in English. It should be between 40 and 80 pages long (rough estimate, this can significantly depend on your topic, results, and writing style). For further information, I recommend reading:
- Tips for writing technical papers
- The Paper-writing tips by EPFL’s dlab
- The provided information from our student starter kit (see below)
Write your thesis in LaTex, using templates from the Student Starter Kit. I recommend overleaf, but the choice of editor is up to you and depends on personal preferences. When writing latex, here are some additional tips:
- Use a new line for each sentence. This makes corrections and diffs way easier.
- Write your thesis in a top-down approach. Start with a high-level table of contents. Then, for each section, divide it into subsections, then divide them into paragraphs.
- Think about the content before you start working on the formulations.
- One sentence should transmit one idea or message. It should only be possible to remove a sentence by deleting relevant information.
- It can help to structure your content with questions. Use latex comments to pose questions to yourself, then answer them in the text. This technique helps you generate an appealing structure for your reader.
- If you find an especially good graphic, figure, or table, you can see whether the paper is on arXiv. It’s a little-known fact that you can download arXiv-paper sources directly and see how the papers were produced. On the top-right, click on “Downloads –> other formats”. For example, you will find that even the most famous authors use the question-answer technique for their writing when you check the comments in their source.
Presenting your Research
Good research is only useful if others can understand it. Even more so, good research will not be recognized if presented well. It’s something many researchers don’t love to do, but in my opinion, selling your research is an important part of the job. This holds true for your thesis but is even more important for any presentation you will give - an intermediate group presentation or a final thesis defense. Without an explicit order, I recommend taking care of the following points:
- Be excited about what you do and let others know.
- Make it look nice. Your work must be appealing to the naked eye. (Have a look at the pudding - before you even read the content, their research looks engaging)
- Explain it in simple words. This is hard to do if you have to stay accurate at the same time. You can train by talking about your work with friends and family.
- Tell a story: What is the problem? Why is it important? What are YOU doing to solve it?
- When holding a presentation, try it at home first. Learn to speak freely, highlight important words, and use breaks and body language.
- Keep it short.