Introduction

In 2020, I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis. Despite a supportive supervisor and a decent final result, the process itself was often unpleasant, full of self-doubt and poor work-life balance. When I started my Master’s thesis one and a half years later, I knew I wanted things to be different. After contemplating what went wrong before, I came up with a plan that would ensure my experience was better this time. In this post, I discuss what I learnt along the way and what I wish I had known 3 years ago. I know reading this would help me in the past and if you are starting your Bachelor or Master thesis right now, I hope it will help you as well.

Writing a thesis at the end of your degree can often be confusing, as it is very different from previous semesters, especially in degrees like Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence. Before that time, you had a clear schedule for every day filled with lectures and tutorials. Every week or so, there were deadlines for short assignments or group projects. Thesis flips this situation by 180 degrees: no more lectures, tutorials or assignments. All you know is that in a couple months you have to hand in a scientific article spanning between 20 and 100 pages. With all these changes it’s easy to feel lost or demotivated.

In the sections below, I will share:

• How to choose your thesis topic?
• How to communicate with your supervisor?
• How to stay motivated, productive and maintain a work-life balance?
• How to ensure a bright future after graduation?

Define your goal

Firstly, ask yourself what you want to achieve by the end of your thesis. What aspects are important to you? Do you want to explore a completely new field or dive deeper into something you are already familiar with? Is getting a high grade important for you? Spoiler: unless you stay in academia, it probably shouldn’t be. Would you like to publish at a research conference, continue walking the academic path and become a researcher? Or would you rather get a job in the industry? Answering those questions will help you realize your needs and ambitions and tailor a thesis that suits you best. Often you can choose between a thesis internship in the industry or one of the research labs within your university. I did my Bachelor’s thesis at a company and then Master’s thesis in a research group which allowed me to see both sides of the coin.

Industry thesis

Thesis internships at a company are usually more applied and less research-oriented, so if your goal is to publish your work at a top tier research conference, that’s probably not the path for you. An example topic could be to validate a new algorithm compared to the existing approach used at the given company.

The benefit is that you can experience a real working environment and potentially get paid a small internship salary. On top of that, if you do well, the company will likely offer you a full-time role after your thesis. This can be particularly attractive as finding a job right after graduation without work experience is a difficult task. However, the job market becomes a lot friendlier after spending 2+ years at your first full-time position.

There are multiple downsides as well. Your university and the company might have conflicting expectations towards your work. The former wants you to produce valuable research while the latter aims to improve their product which can be boring or have little scientific insight. Managing those expectations tends to be tricky and can significantly delay your project.

Moreover, there might be issues beyond your control which can slow you down. The most common example of it is access to internal data. If you are supposed to develop a product, you often need to use company’s data. After university courses in data science you might be used to clean, curated datasets that are ready for you to use for training a model. Well, welcome to real life! It is gonna take at least a month for you to even see the data. Then you will start exploring it and find various issues such as missing values or labels, noise, you name it — another month gone. To avoid such pitfalls you can decide to use publicly available datasets in similar domain from the start or do your best to ensure the data quality, i.e. before accepting the internship, ask a lot of questions such as how do they collect their data and how many data samples they already have.

Research thesis

On the opposite side of the spectrum lies a thesis at a research group within a university. In this case, you don’t have to deal with contradicting goals of your supervisors. Your “only” concern is to conduct insightful research. Unless your topic is completely unexplored, there are probably public benchmark datasets so data collection won’t be a problem. Without these obstacles you can spend more time on more fruitful tasks and you’re more likely to publish in a journal or conference.

Nevertheless, pure research is difficult and requires a specific mindset and set of skills which will not necessarily translate to more engineering-oriented jobs. Besides that, you miss out on all the perks described in the previous paragraph. Certainly you won’t get an internship allowance and getting your first job will be more troublesome.

Mostly likely you don’t want to do a thesis in a research group (provided you have other alternatives such as an industry thesis) unless you’re considering doing a PhD or a research-oriented job in the industry (though those are hard to come by without a PhD degree). This might sound obvious, but pursuing a Master’s traps you in a gigantic echo chamber. Everyone around you seems to be an academic. You listen to lectures given by professors and attend tutorials carried out by PhD candidates. All of this subconsciously makes you feel that almost everyone goes into academia after graduating while in reality 95% of people get a job in the industry.

Thesis supervisor

Find your supervisor

Once you make up your mind, it’s time to find your supervisor.

Seniority in academia is inversely proportional to time availability. Senior researchers might have more experience, but they supervise many Master or PhD students at the same time so they will have less time and attention for you. Conversely, younger researchers are relatively less busy, hence they can provide you with more guidance and feedback. Moreover, if your thesis goes well, they might be able to publish it with you which can positively contribute to their PhD and serve as a strong incentive to commit.

Do some research about your potential supervisors, read their published papers. Are they interesting to you? Schedule a call or meeting with them.

• Are they able to explain the thesis topic clearly? If not, it might mean communicating with them during your thesis will be problematic.
• Do they seem excited about it? Do they post their research on social media such as Twitter?
• Did you have any lectures with them? Did you enjoy them?

Communication with the supervisor

Once you find someone willing to supervise your thesis, keep them in the loop on a regular basis. Communicating with them is one of the crucial components of a successful thesis. It can greatly improve the final outcome and help to maintain motivation. Additionally, building a strong working relationship with your supervisor can be beneficial for both of you in the long run, as they may be able to provide valuable references and connections in the future (or you might do it for them).

Schedule regular (e.g. weekly) meetings with your supervisor to keep them updated on your progress and ask for help if necessary. If you are doing something wrong, it will be easier to spot and correct you before it’s too late. During each meeting you can discuss what you’ve done recently, what are your next steps and ask any questions that came up in the past couple days. At the end of every session, tell your supervisor about the tasks which you are planning to finish before next time. This will give you a clear plan of action and make you feel accountable.

Productivity & work-life balance

A large research project can be a great opportunity to delve deeply into a topic that interests you and to have the freedom to explore different ideas and approaches. However, you can become so absorbed in your work that you neglect other areas of your life, such as your relationships, personal health, and self-care. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is crucial for your well-being and overall success. It’s important to set boundaries and make time for activities outside of work. Here are a few tips that helped me out.

Take breaks and don’t work on weekends

Thesis is a marathon, not a sprint. Speed-running your assignment until 4 am could have given results before, but it won’t make or break your thesis. Taking time off and having a healthy sleep schedule over a couple months will give much more benefits than burning the midnight oil every day. You might think “I just need to focus and finish this experiment and THEN I can take care of other things”. But then another task comes around, the cycle repeats and you still haven’t cleaned that pot with leftover pasta from last week.

Stay active

It’s no surprise that spending most of the day sitting in front of your desk isn’t great for you. We all know the benefits of physical activity, but there are various reasons that stop us from doing it. After talking about it with many of my friends, I think the key is to try many things and choose something you genuinely enjoy. You can decide about the level of intensity, whether you want it to be a group activity or a time just for yourself. Some people like yoga or dancing, others prefer boxing, football or exercising at the gym. Don’t try to start an overambitious and strict schedule, just go once a week when you feel like it. You don’t have to be good at it either, doing anything is always better than doing nothing at all.

Talk with your classmates

Without daily lectures and tutorials, it can be tough to stay connected with your classmates, especially when you’re working on a long and complex project like a thesis. However, sharing your experiences with fellow students can make a huge difference for your well-being. For starters, it makes you feel less isolated, which is a common problem when working on a big project like this. It’s easy to get the idea that you’re the only one struggling, but when you talk to your classmates and hear about their own experiences, you realize that you’re not alone. Experiments often fail, coding always takes longer than expected and few people are innately talented writers. Being reminded that others face the same issues can be really reassuring.

It can also provide you with valuable feedback and insights that may improve your work and give you a fresh perspective. After all, you study the same degree so they are also knowledgeable in this field, even if they don’t know the ins and outs of your particular topic. After weeks of literature review, it’s tough to see the big picture and to spot potential problems with your own work. But discussing it with other people, often leads to new ideas that you might not have thought of on your own.

Write a plan for every day

This idea helps with two common issues at the same time:

• Often the hardest part of work is to get started
• After a long time spent on the same project, days start to blend in together and you might feel like you aren’t making any progress

This is a very simple, but effective trick: before finishing working every day (or night), make a list of tasks that you should do tomorrow. Right at the end, you know exactly where you need to pick up when you come back. Having a ready list the next day makes it so much easier to jump right back in. Additionally, looking at the list of checked off items at the end will help you realize you actually got a lot done.

Now you might think the goal here is to finish all the things on the list and you could not be more wrong. To be honest, I almost never finish all of them and that’s totally fine! Sure it’s nice when it happens, but I’m pretty certain that making a plan and finishing 50% of it will always result in getting more things done than working without a plan. So just making it already puts you ahead.

As a bonus, you can also go one level higher and determine one or two main tasks which you want to finish every week. Having those bigger objectives might help you structure the daily tasks.

Think about life after thesis

Talk to people

During your thesis, you will usually join a research lab or a company. You will be surrounded by experienced people working on similar topics to yours. This is a great environment to figure out if you would like to continue your career in the domain of your thesis and to get a broad understanding of the field by learning from experts. Ask them questions about their work, most people like talking about it — the fact that someone asks gives them external validation that their job is valuable and explaining concepts to a beginner (you) reminds them how knowledgeable they are (which is easy to forget while constantly comparing yourself to papers from top conferences). Most people in their early 20s are still figuring out what they want to do. Getting a broad idea of the possible directions is in my opinion one of the best way to answer that question. Therefore, asking people questions is a win-win situation for both sides. Go to lunch together, probably the easiest small talk question to ask is “What are you currently working on?” or “How is your research going?”.

Many research labs and some companies have regular presentations/demos where employees show what they’ve been working on, try to attend them, especially at the beginning of your thesis. This gives you all the benefits I listed above and on top of that it improves your presentation skills.

In essence, try to build relationships with people around you, but don’t be fake about it. Firstly, it’s an unethical thing to do. Secondly, it’s extremely easy to spot if someone has a hidden agenda and no one likes suck-ups. After finishing your thesis you will try to find a job and doing that is much easier with a network. At the same time, make sure to do a similar favour to other people you meet in the future — be ready to refer them when they are looking for jobs. I think that’s the main difference that makes this process less calculated and more human — being ready to give back. Wherever you are in your timeline, there are always people behind you. Someone is asking about the Bachelor’s degree you went to? Share with him you experiences. Think how much you would have appreciated this knowledge when you were considering this degree 5 years ago.

Conclusion

That’s a wrap! These are the insights I found the most helpful during this challenging time. We discussed how important it is to reflect at the very beginning what is your goal — the end result that you would ideally like to achieve. I shared tips that worked out for me on productivity and maintaining motivation, but remember that these are very personal, so it’s best to try out many things and figure out which ones are best for you. I hope this post gave you some inspiration and will help you to have a good time when writing your thesis. I would love to see what others have to say about the topic, so feel free to comment below or DM me to share your thoughts.