Finishing the master's thesis - I wish I had known this before I started

Whether you’re at university or college, the last obstacle on your way to graduation is a thesis or equivalent. It’s a piece of work that follows sound scientific practice, where you inevitably have to do a lot of groundwork and write rigorously on the basis of source material. There is no room for personal opinions or narrative.

I myself have done two Master’s degrees, both of which involved quite ambitious theses. In hindsight, I have realized that it could have been easier if I had known a few important things earlier. The teaching and guidance at the university were top-class but focused primarily on the content and research rather than the process behind it. I made many mistakes before I learned to build a systematic and effective way of working.

In this article, I’ll go through how to plan your thesis process and time management so that you can work easily and always know what you’re doing next. In addition, your materials will stay organized and your text will gradually get better and better. Whether you’re in the early stages or already at the finishing line, you can make the most of the tips that are most relevant to you.

Note that these cornerstones of a good process are also applicable to any larger project or final project where writing according to the source material and scientific rules is a prerequisite. I am talking specifically about a thesis in the article, but think more broadly in terms of any larger work.

In this article, you will find 10 tips to make your work easier. It’s worth focusing on one at a time and moving on to the next once you’ve got the hang of it. Some will be done fairly quickly, but others will take you longer to build up a routine. The text is also quite long, so it might not be a bad idea to chop it up into sections and apply the themes one by one.

The cornerstones of a good thesis process

• Plan your schedule and calendar to support your work
• Find motivation and prepare in advance for moments when it is hard to find it
• Try to get hold of the source material as quickly as possible and take good care of it
• Get to grips with styles, methods and practices from the outset
• Build up a workable system for managing sources and materials
• Benchmark both old theses and scientific articles in your field
• Start with the big picture and get to grips with the underlying theories
• Start writing as early as possible and write in a process-oriented way, improving your text as you go along
• Make use of available tools and artificial intelligence
• Network and collaborate with others at the same stage

Plan your schedule and calendar to support your work

As with any project, it’s worth planning your thesis properly and updating your plan. The longer the project, the more likely you are to have to make changes along the way. It is common for progress to be slower than previously thought and timetables will have to be tweaked as a result. We tend to be over-optimistic about our own performance and potential problems. For example, have you ever seen a public construction project completed on time and on target?

There are three levels of time in which to plan the project:

• A schedule that covers the whole project
• Monthly schedule
• Weekly calendar/schedule

A comprehensive timetable for the whole project mainly includes the big milestones, such as deadlines, presentations of the process in a seminar, meetings with the supervisor and work steps such as collecting data, cleaning up the data, studying the background theories, collecting materials, writing the raw text, etc. Basically, the project timetable also serves as a goal-setting tool, telling you where you are at any given moment.

In the monthly schedule, you unpack the project schedule to make it more concrete. It’s helpful to plan how you will allocate your time, down to the week. Hopefully, most weeks you will be able to devote the majority of your time to the thesis process, but this is not always the case. For example, I did my second thesis alongside a full-time job, which meant squeezing writing time in where I could find it, usually evenings and weekends. It’s important to be honest about how much effective working time you actually have available in a week. A single week might look like this, for example:

• Thesis: 20 hours
• Other courses: 4 hours
• Work: 14 hours
• Sport and physical activity: 4 hours
• Other hobbies: 2 hours
• Friends and family: 6 hours

A normal working week is around 40 hours, so that’s starting to be enough, considering that you also need to sleep, eat and take care of the other necessities of life. So it’s essential to be able to plan your time honestly so that you have a genuine life balance and enough unplanned time.

In the weekly timetable, you break down your monthly timetable into a concrete timetable at a weekly level. You should set aside time once a week to plan the week ahead and check whether the past week went according to plan. In the weekly timetable, you place the lessons from your monthly timetable under the week in question. This will give you a clear picture of how your days are shaped and how things balance each other out.

Don’t worry if you don’t always stick to the original plan. You can always change your plans and you’ll gain valuable information for the following week’s planning.

Find motivation and prepare in advance for moments when it’s hard to find it

It’s entirely possible that you’ll be hugely excited about your thesis project, and finding new information in the data is hugely rewarding. However, you should also be prepared for the fact that there will be times when working on your project could not be less interesting. Without motivation, working on a thesis is challenging and the results are usually meager. Moreover, if you lose motivation in the early stages, the dissertation process can feel overwhelmingly long. What to do?

First of all, it’s good to understand when it’s a lack of motivation and when it’s a lack of concentration or poor alertness. If you’re consistently sleep-deprived, unhealthy and glued to your smartphone, it’s not necessarily a question of motivation, but purely because your brain is not capable of sustained, focused work right now. The only thing that can help is a gradual review and correction of your routines.

If, on the other hand, the issue is one of genuine motivation, there is no internal (e.g. learning, development, interest, knowledge creation) or external (e.g. money, grades, graduation, opinions of others) source of motivation. Motivation research has found that intrinsic motivation generally leads to better outcomes than extrinsic motivation, but is more difficult to generate and maintain. Therefore, external sources of motivation often provide just the extra drive needed to get things done, and at the same time may trigger an internal fire to pursue external ones. For example, you may find strength in the idea that graduation is just around the corner and you will be able to show your skills on the job market.

A common misconception about motivation is that motivation leads to results and without motivation, there are no results. This is only partly true because it is really a cycle:

Results create motivation, which in turn creates more results.

The challenge with the thesis process is that it’s so big and vast that it’s sometimes hard to see the actual results. This is why it is important to set yourself milestones at the planning stage, such as:

• Data collected
• Data cleaned up
• Headings created
• Sources collected
• The first paragraph of the text created
• 10 hours spent on thesis

Achieving small goals gives tremendous momentum to continue with the project as we start to see tangible results and at the same time achieve the goals we set for ourselves.

Try to get hold of the source material as quickly as possible and take good care of it

In scientific research, you almost always work with original material. It’s raw data about reality and the researcher’s job is to find regularities and correlations - in other words, information.

My first thesis was based on online discussions about history. I investigated the attitudes of discussants towards historical phenomena through recurrences and categorizations. I did not understand anything about narrowing down the data, as I randomly selected all the conversations over a 10-year period, which eventually ended up with 24,000 in the study itself. This is far too much for a single thesis and it took an inordinate amount of time to collect the data. On top of everything else, the real work only started when I finally finished collecting the data.

In the second thesis, the situation was different. I conducted a quantitative study on the impact of smart device use on school well-being among secondary school-age adolescents. The raw material was immediately available from the research team working on the topic. It was great to be able to do different searches and analyses right at the beginning of the process. This also made the work itself more concrete, even though I did the actual analyses later.

So try to get your hands on your material as early as possible and explore it in a broad and open-minded way. Of course, at this stage, you will not draw any conclusions from it, but at most, you will draw a tentative hypothesis.

Remember to store and handle your material in accordance with your faculty and general ethical guidelines.

Get to grips with styles, methods and practices right from the outset

Hopefully, you have had time to take methodological studies and practice scientific writing before you start your thesis process. Of course, you are not yet a complete researcher at this stage, as your thesis is a practice work - not an independent study to be published as such. However, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you write in accordance with your scientific practice from the very beginning, follow stylistic conventions (e.g. APA) and know the methodology you will use to analyze your data (e.g. qualitative or quantitative methods).

I wrote my first thesis very freely in essay format, but I had to make huge adjustments to the style along the way. It still remained quite free-form, which is somewhat more permissible in historical research. By contrast, my second degree in education strictly followed the conventions of academic texts in the field. Here, too, I had to edit my text several times, thanks to the precise comments of my supervisors.

Even when writing a raw text, you should try to make sure that all references and sentence structures are the same as in the final text, even if they change a lot. Similarly, when creating a reference list, add the works from the beginning as instructed. This will give you practice in sticking to the style, rather than changing it in the middle.

It’s worth linking to your own best source style guides for quick access, and checking with your tutors whether the style is definitely what is expected. The web is nowadays full of both good method guides and style guides. In addition, it is worth keeping the generative AI involved from the start of the process, as long as you remember to be critical of the instructions and tips it gives you.

Also, remember to start the actual editing right away on a base where headings, paragraph spacing, margins and the like are formatted as they will be in the final version. This will save you the trouble of having to change the text mass into a publishable format.

Build yourself a workable system for managing sources and materials

In scientific writing, you cannot write your own opinions in a free-form way; in practice, all text must be based on source material or on your own data. You will probably end up with several dozen scientific articles and outputs as the basis for your work. You will be comparing them, using the same articles in many places and weighing up which ones deserve to be included in your work and which do not.

This is why it’s a good idea to organize all your sources in a neat format from the outset, making them easy to return to and easy to search. Similarly, the list should be updatable. Personally, I prefer a spreadsheet database that includes the following:

The title of the article identifies the sources and gives a general idea of what the source is about.

I include the reference as it would be written in the format I use in the actual text. This way I don’t have to write the reference separately each time I use the article in the text.

Keep the description short and focus only on the main finding of the article. The table shows directly what the article is about and what its main finding is. Ideally, this alone will be enough to remind you of the article as a whole and you will be able to refer to it without having to read it again.

The tags help you to search and organise materials by theme. In my second thesis, I used themes such as depression, school fatigue, digital well-being, school spirit and digital research. When writing about a particular theme, I organised the articles so that all the tags for that theme were placed side by side. This gave me an immediate idea of what my sources had to say on the subject, and whether they were sufficient.

The link will take you directly to the database where you can read the article in full. Of course, in all fields, the sources are not purely electronic and you may have to make trips to the library. In this case, add the location of the library to the link.

One could also add an item to the table to name the article in the bibliography so that the table could eventually be used to create a bibliography. However, I decided to use an online service, which was able to create a list in the format I wanted. It may well be that you have access to the best source management software through your institution. Take advantage of them.

The source table itself can be done well with e.g. Excel or Sheets. Personally, I prefer Notion, where my other notes are located.

Benchmark both old theses and scientific articles in your field

When starting a thesis, it can be difficult to visualize what the final output will be, or what topics you should write about in general. It’s worth bearing in mind that many other people have been in the same situation or are doing research for a living. Moreover, the principles of scientific knowledge include consistency and comparison of findings. Therefore, benchmarking other papers and articles related to your topic is a prerequisite for success.

I started by looking for published theses from my own faculty and it was particularly helpful that there were several other papers on the same large research project. I first tried to find a bundle of the best papers and then refined their structure, style and output. They also guided me to the best source materials, which again helped in this work.

I then did the same for related scientific articles, trying to emulate their style. I also went back to the best papers on several occasions when I was unsure about a stylistic issue or wanted to make sure that my analysis followed the rules of science.

Start with the big picture and get to grips with the background theory

Wading through and narrowing down sources can feel like an endless jungle. Once you have found an article on a topic, you will find that there are dozens of publications worth exploring and 10 new sources to be found. How to choose the most relevant ones and where to draw the line?

1. Theoretical framework

Start with the big paradigms and classic theories in your discipline, and consider how your own work fits into the continuum. In psychological research, for example, you are unlikely to refer to Freud or Skinner, but you should be aware of the place of current research in the history of the field.

Your own research is likely to fall within the current fad, but it is good to recognize that this too is only part of the evolution of the scientific debate. It is good to note that the research field related to, for example, digitalization or artificial intelligence is evolving quite rapidly with the subject of the research. It is also worth being bold in comparing and competing with the most established theoretical frameworks.

2. Metasurveys and literature reviews

Meta-researches and literature reviews are the aristocracy of scientific research. They are compilations of the best studies, summarising and drawing conclusions from them. Their weight and importance in the scientific hierarchy is high. It is clear, for example, that when examining the relationship between eating habits and symptoms of depression, 10 studies on the same topic are a more powerful source than just one. This is what science is essentially based on, even if the tabloids sometimes have difficulty separating the real information from the findings of a single study.

3. Current and most referenced studies

Studies and articles are constantly competing for popularity, the best publishing platforms and longevity among other publications. The best and most cited articles are surfacing, and rightly so. Their information is genuinely relevant and refining the scientific consensus.

Try to find the most relevant and up-to-date articles for your own research. The best way to find them is to look at what research groups, either in your own institution or in other institutions, are doing on the subject at the moment. They will probably have some sort of website or information package, ideally with the contact details of one of the researchers. You could save a lot of work if you can book a meeting or even exchange a few emails with a researcher who is familiar with the topic.

4. Methodological articles

You can’t pull your actual analysis out of a hat, you have to follow the rules of your discipline to the letter. Part of this is linked to the point about the theoretical framework, as the methods are based on a certain theory.

If you are doing quantitative research, take the time to really understand what you are doing rather than just following a list of instructions on how to do the analysis. The nuances of statistical methods can be challenging to understand, but the work is worth it. This way you really understand what your readings mean and can write about them with comparative accuracy.

Understanding is also important in qualitative methods, but it is worthwhile to pay particular attention to the applicability of the theory to your own work, and to critical reflection on it. Don’t settle for one framework and method, but critically compare it with other possibilities.

Start writing as early as possible and write in a processual way, improving your text as you go

In the previous section, you dived into the world of sources in hierarchical order. As you read sources, be sure to take notes and organize them into tables as we went through earlier. By no means should you read every article from start to finish, but look for the essential findings in the abstract, introduction and summary.

For clarity, it would be great if the process could be broken down into clear steps such as planning, searching for information, reading articles, writing and finalizing, but in the real world this is not possible. You are constantly working with your sources and your data, going back and forth between planning the whole process, writing one section, finalizing another, etc.

You have to think of a thesis as a process, where the parts are gradually polished to perfection and final form. Along the way, both your own and your supervisors’ critical feedback are crucial.

The planning and data collection phase takes a lot of work, but it is also easy to get hooked because the writing itself is an active and brain-taxing task that we may unconsciously run away from and fear. It’s easier to find a few more good sources than to start genuinely writing a text based on them.

But it’s worth taking the bull by the horns and starting the actual writing early. Of course, the text will be clunky and choppy at first, but it will become more accurate as the process goes on.

Start by creating a basic structure, where you add all the headings and their subheadings. Below them, add some text about what you are going to write here. Then, using bullet points, for example, add the key points and the order in which the texts are presented. At the same time, you should also link to the main sources you intend to use.

Start writing somewhere you can easily get started, e.g. describing the theoretical framework or presenting the data. Keep your sources and the best work you have benchmarked in the process. Remember that the text does not have to be ready all at once. You will return to it many times, deleting sections, revising your comments and correcting the wording. The most important thing is to start writing as early as possible because it is writing that structures your thoughts.

Take advantage of available tools and artificial intelligence

One of the key principles of doing science is to use the latest and best tools to collect and analyze data. A few decades ago, statistical methods, for example, required considerable mathematical skills when spreadsheets were not available to support the work. Similarly, articles were hunted not from online databases but from the library’s physical collections.

Today, it would be madness not to use the services available, which make the work faster, more efficient and of better quality. When working on a thesis, it is worth considering at least the use of the following enabling technologies:

• Word processing (templates, text formatting, grammar correction)
• Databases (articles and background literature)
• Note-taking application (design, listing of sources)
• Spreadsheet applications (if you are doing quantitative research)
• Source listing applications and services (organizing sources)
• Discipline-specific applications and services
• Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence deserves an extra mention. As generative AI has pushed its way into the public consciousness, it has gradually shaped all knowledge work. Scientific research is one of its core competencies and certainly in the future AI will play a huge role in research projects. It may soon be that AI will be fluent in writing articles in which the scientific method and use of sources is far superior to that of humans.

In the thesis process, it is worth harnessing AI as a collaborator at all stages. You can ask it to help you set up your weekly schedule, describe your theoretical framework in a way you can understand, find sources for a particular passage, proofread your writing, recommend improvements or organize your sources.

Think of AI as your research assistant, available 24/7. But don’t outsource work to it, as it’s only in training and prone to all sorts of errors and glitches. You’re also unlikely to want to give it credit for your own significant achievement. Remember, in true motivation, you are not trying to finish your degree for the sake of achievement, but for the sake of genuine learning. AI will help you learn, but only if you don’t give it too much power.

Remember to be source-critical and check the AI proposals elsewhere too. It wouldn’t be the first time it recommends articles and researchers that don’t exist as sources. Also, carefully review your institution’s AI guidelines, rules and privacy policy. For example, under no circumstances should you submit entrusted material to be processed by AI unless you are absolutely sure that it is allowed.

Network and collaborate with others at the same stage

Science is hardly done alone in the dusty corners of the library anymore; most new discoveries are the result of the hard work of research teams. There is a reason for this. The group is much more efficient in sharing its knowledge and expertise, and not everyone has to reinvent the wheel.

In the best case, you’ll get to do your own thesis in a research group or at least learn from the groundwork of one. This is also good in the sense that the research group is involved in something topical, which is also very likely to have received external funding. So this is also good currency for your own future employment and skills.

You are also likely to be working in a seminar group with other graduates at the same stage. Hopefully, your seminar hasn’t been reduced to a remote debriefing session, but you’ll be able to genuinely meet each other and bounce ideas off your supervisors and each other.

Personally, I found it enormously helpful to realize that I’m not the only one who struggles with certain themes. I had many “of course!” experiences when someone told me how they had solved such a complex problem for me. On the other hand, I also felt I could help others from time to time.

Networking should also not only be seen as a personal benefit, it is also genuinely rewarding and fulfills our basic need to belong to a group. Even if you feel like an introvert who likes to keep to yourself, it’s worth giving the support of a group a chance. In the end, as a group, we are pretty much stronger than the sum of our parts.

Finally

Thank you for reading this far. I hope you found some additional tools to support your thesis project. Remember, it’s all about learning and growing as a person, not so much about performance. Don’t worry if you’re not motivated right now. By gritting your teeth and moving forward in small steps, you will find motivation in the results.

It is full of content that can be useful to you in the future. Start with our free learning path, which takes you through the best ways to learn, focus, plan and remember. This will help you to consider whether you want to delve deeper into the themes of learning and self-development.

Good luck with the project!