It is possible to complete your thesis in 6 months, even if you don’t know what to write or you haven’t finished your research. In this hour-long webinar I gave to Finish Your Thesis with Dora Farkas students earlier this week, I discuss the process of going from being a block writer to writing hundreds of words a day.
I discuss the following:
Discuss the results
The discussion is a summary of your findings and how they relate to your research. You should explain what these results mean and how they add to your current understanding of your discipline. You probably need to reserve most of the time for this, because you need to check all your research here.
It is also important to include the limits and consequences of your work here. You can also compare and critique your work with other similar research papers in the field, so that it is clear where you stand in the field and what your work contributes to the field.
7 useful guidelines for writing the right thesis
My 15-hour days turned into 18-hour days fueled by junk food and soda.
Still, it wasn’t going anywhere.
Always set goals and have plans
They will help you get back on track and remind you of the old intentions you had when you started your thesis.
Like the time of the thesis, it is very useful to have goals and plans to keep you on track and on time. Write down not only the long-term plans for the final results of the thesis, but also the achievable deadlines in the short term, and keep them constantly updated. What do you expect from the final report? How much work do you need to do in the first 3 months? What are you going to achieve by the end of this week? And so, what do you have to finish today? But remember, set realistic goals and allow yourself to change your plans if necessary. Thesis work can be unpredictable.
I wrote the two easy chapters
It was easy to complete the “Geological Setting” and “Data and Method” chapters, because I had used this information for presentations and posters during my PhD program. Writing these chapters gave me a confidence boost: most of my thesis was done, or so I thought at the time.
Based on my review of the existing literature, I started to write my introduction, probably the most difficult chapter of my thesis. It had too much information and was poorly structured. But after many rewrites and revisions, I managed to create a draft chapter.