This page explains how bachelor's and master's theses are written in the VSS group.
Once a topic has been established, your thesis follows this roadmap:
Time-wise, this roadmap should roughly work out as follows:
| Milestone | Bachelor’s | Master’s |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Discussion | Max 2 weeks | Max 2 weeks |
| Write Exposé | 4 weeks | 6 weeks |
| Registration | t=0 | t=0 |
| Interim Presentation | +6 weeks | +8 weeks |
| First Chapters | -4 weeks | -6 weeks |
| Submission | +3 months (~30 pages) | +6 months (~60–80 pages) |
| Final Presentation | +2 weeks (20 min+QA) | +2 weeks (30 min+QA) |
We have a bi-weekly meeting together with all students currently working on a thesis in our group. We use a Stud.IP course to organize it. Your supervisor will add you to it. Once you are added to this course, you will receive a bi-weekly email that reminds you of the meeting.
The meeting itself starts with an update round and may or may not be followed by a thesis defense or interim presentation. For the update round, everyone has to prepare a bullet list of talking points beforehand to efficiently and concisely report on current progress and initiate brief discussions on challenges. The prepared notes are kept in a shared pad, which is referenced within the Stud.IP course.
During each update round, every student presents their thesis topic in 1-2 sentences and then reports on their current progress. Other students are encouraged to ask questions if they don't understand the topic.
It is vital to ensure that students truly understand the problem they are working on. In too many cases, misunderstandings between supervisors and students have led to valuable time being wasted. Therefore, we require an exposé to be written to establish a shared understanding of the research task.
The secondary goal of the exposé is for students to write approximately 10 pages in academic language (see below) and conduct an initial literature review. This allows both the students and us to assess early on how comfortable they are with the writing process. Further, it also helps to reduce panic during the final month of the thesis.
The process for the exposé is as follows:
The exposé should include the following section:
Your supervisor can provide you with an exemplary exposé.
We require the students to give an interim talk while they are working on their thesis. In this interim talk, they have to present the problem, show their current progress, and organize the discussion round. The students should view the talk as an opportunity to gather feedback on their current work (from supervisors, professors, and other students) and are expected to incorporate this feedback into their thesis document. For the most part, this presentation is similar to the oral thesis defense, and you should thus see this as a trial run for that as well. The interim talk is 20 minutes + discussion for bachelor's and 30 minutes + discussion for master's.
The talk should focus on the essential ideas and preliminary results obtained so far. See also: How to Give a Great Research Talk.
proposal option of the document class (e.g., \documentclass[thesistype=master,proposal]{tubsthesis}).There are several resources that are helpful with respect to the process of conducting research, including the presentation of your results in written or oral form. To this end, the following books may be useful:
You don't have to read these books from beginning to end, but they can provide helpful input to write an introduction, give a presentation, find related work, conduct empirical evaluations, etc. For further input, you can also look at our publications and your own related work for exemplary introductions, discussions of prior work, writeups of experimental evaluations, and more.
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