Tips & Tricks for your graduation thesis

Tips & tricks for writing your thesis

When you’re writing your thesis, it’s important that you produce a practical and realistic plan. Do that with someone else and make agreements. Mirjam Ubachs, lecturer and thesis supervisor for the Commercial Management study programme, presents some dos and don’ts below that will help you to successfully complete your thesis.

Think of your lecturer as someone with whom you can brainstorm about the problem, not as someone who just gives feedback.

Send a joint e-mail message every week to your lecturer and company supervisor. The lecturer and company supervisor can then see each other’s feedback on the draft.

In the second week of your internship, make sure that your supervising lecturer pays you a visit to discuss the research issues etc. with you and your company supervisor. Brainstorm together and make sure that everyone’s expectations are clear afterwards.

Ensure you communicate regularly and openly with everyone involved, so that everyone knows about each other’s expectations, progress, and any feedback.

Try to process feedback as effectively as possible and discuss with whoever is giving the feedback about why the feedback was given. Then adjust the feedback together and incorporate it into your assignment or project.

Write your thesis using language that everyone understands – your neighbour should be able to read it. Regularly print out your thesis and read your hard copy: try to optimize your use of English, sentence structure, spelling, etc. Reading the text out loud and asking yourself ‘What does this actually say’? often helps. Avoid long, complex, and unreadable sentences.

Write your thesis for your target groups: the client and school/examiner. Empathize with these target groups.

Make sure your thesis is in line with your study programme’s requirements in terms of the order of the parts, the research topics to be approved, and other aspects.

Place a note on your laptop with your client’s business goal (i.e. the goal they want to achieve with the recommendations from your thesis), so that you work with the end goal in mind and avoid adding all kinds of other subjects. It will also help you focus better.

Be brave enough to finish chapters and move on. You might be tempted to add in new theory you come across when you’ve finished your literature research, but don’t – you could easily run out of time.

Publish your graduation work

Think you can do everything on your own. Only involve your supervising lecturer and your company supervisor in your progress and your thesis when it’s already too late.

Start planning too late and don’t stick to your plan.

Ignore feedback.

Ignore the thesis assessment form. Never take the time to make sure your thesis is in line with the criteria on the assessment form.

Be stubborn. Your supervising lecturer only wants to help you to submit a successful thesis.

Be put off by the amount of feedback. Your supervisor just wants to help you.

Think of feedback as criticism. If you want to get your final project noticed, you can have it published by www.hbo-kennisbank.nl. Your programme will determine whether you can publish your work. You retain the copyright to the work and can always ask Zuyd University library to remove the final project from the database. If you did your project for a company or other client, then check to make sure that they consent to the publication. For more information, visit Zuydnet>studying>academicguidance>graduate.