Tutoring beginning graduate students. This short presentation instructs on keeping at preparation of the thesis while making progress with the experiments.

1. Format and substance of thesis
Research Methodology
Seppo Karrila
2017

2. Executive summary
• The goal of this presentation is to make it easy
for you to write your thesis
• I encourage you to write good progress
reports, almost like mini-articles, and use
these together with your research proposal as
parts in your thesis
• Some details of thesis structure and outline
are touched lightly

3. Overall outline
• A generic outline of an MS thesis is given in
Chapter 4 of Lowe.
• However, practices can vary by school, so
– Check if there is a ready-made template that you
can follow
– See a recent accepted local MS thesis, thesis
advisors always get their copy so there are some
around

4. Abstract, introduction and conclusions
• Abstract
– A short advertisement that people in a hurry can read. Half
a page to one page long. Issue, significance, approach,
results, conclusions.
• Introduction
– Some general background, then lead to the research
question or hypothesis
– This can largely come from the research proposal
• Conclusions
– For those who have read the whole thesis, highlight the
most important things you would hope they remember
next week. Things that are useful and affect something in
the future.

5. Results and discussion together or
separately?
• My personal opinion: often they are better
separately
– The reason is that in many write-ups it is difficult
to keep track of what refers to results of the
current study, and what refers to prior literature
– If the current results are clearly presented as a
separate whole, there can’t be such confusion
– This also highlights what are specifically your own
contributions

6. Why starting to write is not a problem
• You have your research proposal as the basis!
• While you are working and producing results, you
are also generating progress reports to your
advisor
• I suggest you copy your proposal, add to it some
chapter titles (using outline in MS-Word), and
start filling in the sections “Materials and
Methods” and “Results” as you go along
– This is much better than collecting a pile of results,
then starting to ponder how to write it all up

7. Important
• Keep backups of your draft
– For example, start with “_1” at end of filename, then use save
as and store under name ending with “_2”, etc. --- this leaves
you a copy of version 1, you now only edit version 2, etc.
– You can e-mail as attachment, to yourself or advisor, this also
serves as a backup
• Why do this?
– Because MS-Word sometimes runs into problems if you insert
figures, or if you edit the same file with different versions of
Office software
• I recommend that you keep figures separate while putting
together the first draft
– PowerPoint and OneNote handle figures very nicely, they are
made for it. Make sure you have the data file for generating
each figure! You may need to re-plot some graphs.

8. Avoid getting into a final crunch
• Once you have a complete first draft, it will still take a
lot of time
– If you have written good progress reports, like sections in a
chapter, you advisor may have helped you improve them
all along the way. Not so if you just showed Excel files.
– The first draft needs checking, commenting, and
improvements: rewriting, deleting, adding… and again,
then once more, and so on. Finally it gets polished enough
that you can share it with your committee
– Then the committee needs time to read it critically, and a
suitable time to meet for your defense. It will not be next
Wednesday… maybe in 6 weeks or so.

9. We have kept this short
• For two reasons
– Later on we have an extensive presentation about
writing a manuscript, it expands on some topics
– In case you are interested, you find lots and lots of
detail guidance in the write-up by Lowe –
however, it is important for us to get our hands on
data visualization and basic statistics. And the
approach suggested in these notes should be
effective even if it is minimalistic.

10. Reference
• Parts of the discussion were influenced by
Lowe: A first textbook of research
methodology… , 2016
Available online at
www.scientificlanguage.com