Tips for your MSc thesis

My goal with this page is to help the interested reader to better select your MSc topic, have an effective start and smooth process.

Next, I give hints on how to align your methodology and wisely keep track of your time, while discussing how to focus on crucial activities.

I might add tips about presentation and defense later...

I've used an example of an MSc topic from a former MSc student,  Aslan Bagirov, to illustrate how the different tips are applied in practice.

Looking for a topic

It all starts with you running around a few possible supervisors looking for a thesis project... The following two tips will help you decide on the right topic.

1) Understand the motivation for the topic, already in the first conversation

Usually your supervisor(s) have a pretty clear idea of what they find relevant to be investigated, and in most cases they have a lot of background information on why they want a specific topic. However, this might pass unnoticed by you, or only briefly mentioned.

To understand this underlying motivation, make sure to actively ask questions on why your supervisor finds this topic relevant, until you understand their motivation. To this already in the first conversation where the topic is discussed.

Having a good grasp of your supervisor's motivation will help you to choose the right topic, and to motivate yourself!

Example of topic that I gave to  Aslan Bagirov, a former MSc student:

• Topic: use of cellular automata to create crashworthy designs by creating simple rules at cellular level. Expected challenge to find what are these simple rules and estimate their effect on the final structural design.

• Motivation: design of crashworthy structures that can absorb more energy within a limited amount of space, important for cases such as the Flying-V or eVTOL aircraft (as shown by Desiderio et al. for example 10.31224/3034)

2) Understand the topic, already in the first conversation

Make sure you are on the same page with your supervisor concerning the intended topic. Try to understand her/his perspective, and ask actively until you reach a point that, after leaving the first meeting, you would be able to explain to someone else about the topic. Make sure you understand the possible research objectives, and even the possible research questions. Make detailed notes about those.

Starting your thesis project

At this point, you have hopefully alredy chosen a supervisor and a potential topic wisely. Now, it is usual to have a more formal kick-off meeting that officially sets the start of your thesis.

3) Discuss your strengths and weaknesses

For an optimum supervision, it is good to make clear to your supervisor about your strenghts and weaknesses. They can certainly help you more when they become aware of these things. You can actively ask how would they help you with the weaknesses. You should also explain how do you see your strengths contibuting to the project, and ask if they understand your point of view, and if they agree. 

4) What is your starting point?

Your starting point highly depends on the readiness level of this topic in your supervisor's research group.

Sometimes, you would continue a well stablished line of research for which you have plenty of available literature and methods within the group. However, in another extreme case, you would be shooting in the dark in a completely new topic that your supervisor wants to explore. As everything in life, the majority of cases will be somewhere in the middle.

Nonetheless, make sure to get acquainted with all that your supervisor has on the topic, where actively asking questions certainly helps. Make detailed notes about:

• names of people and their contact, who have previously worked on related topics, especially if they've worked in the same group.

• available experimental results, where to find them; are there pictures that you can use?

• available models, where to find them, how to use them... is there any tutorial? Make sure you know where to find them.

• available code, where to find them, and how to install (very imporant) on your working computer.

Literature study, framing your research

5) Please, give me some reference to start with!

It is expected that your supervisor will share a few reference papers that relate to the project as a starting point. In case they don't, make sure to ask for these reference materials.

6) The hexagon approach to your literature study

Explore, exploit and converge; a three-step approach that I have created and always recommended to my MSc students and PhD researchers. It is very simple, just divide the time that you have for the literature study in three equal steps, each one explained next.

Explore

Here, you are free to explore the literature related to the research topic and keep track of where the information is. My prefered resouce for exploring is Scopus , because you can easily find papers citing an original paper, rank them by date or number of citations. The older papers and those with more citations are usually the most relevant to focus on.

In the "explore" step, it is crucial to use your time efficiently. My recommendation is always to read actively, meaning that you only open a paper if you know what you are looking for. 

It is also crucial to keep useful notes, which you can use later to recover more detailed information, usually with bullet points and a DOI link to the reference. Make sure to identify correlations between the different sources, how are they related and how

Don't start building a long list of references (a ".bib" file in LaTeX) in the "explore" step. This would be a trivial task at this point, and should therefore be avoided. Just worry about exploring and keeping track of where the information is.

Example based on MSc thesis of Aslan Bagirov, a former student:

Motivation: challenge to design crashworthy structures for Flying-V and eVTOL, due to limited space (as shown by Desiderio et al. 10.31224/3034).

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Literature related to:

Concept of cellular automata

Cellular automata applied to structural design

Topology optimization using cellular automata

Celullar automata for dynamic analysis

Cellular automata for crashworthiness

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Research topic (given by supervisor): cellular automata method to create structural design concepts, finding simple rules at cell level that will result in crashworthy designs.

Recommendations for the "explore" step:

• focus on finding relevant papers

• brainstorm

• keep track of the information that you come accross, usually with bullet points and a DOI link to the reference, or a \cite{} entry if you use LaTeX (I recommend it)

• start identifying correlations between different reference sources, writing those in your notes

• keep short notes of any insights and ideas that come related to your research objective and methodology, but do not spend time refining them 

• if you use \cite{} entries in LaTeX, it is convenient to start building your list of references in a ".bib" file (I convert DOI to ".bib" file using https://www.doi2bib.org/)

• do not, at any cost, refine the text of your literature study report

Exploit

In the "exploit" step the idea is that you've reached a point in your literature study where all relevant papers have been found and their information properly noted by you. Here, you will create links between different authors, find communalities, find contrasting conclusions and build correlations to a deeper level.

You should then build a storyline that connects your research motivation with your research objective.

As shown in the example below, I recommend writing a sequence of
short sentences to indicate the intended storyline. The research gaps should become progressively clearer towards the end of your storyline.

Highlight the research gaps that you've encountered. Adjust the research topic to the research gaps, if necessary, together with your supervisor. This will become your research objective later.

Example based on MSc thesis of Aslan Bagirov, a former student:

Motivation: challenge to design crashworthy structures

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Storyline:

Design of considering crashworthyness constraints challenging, complex phenomenon, response only known when we analyse all time steps until the one of interest, here corresponding to the crashed deformations.

Difficulty in obtaining gradients, can rely on more heuristic methods, such as evolutionary structural optimization (ESO).

Cellular automata (CA) is an ESO method where local rules are defined, leading to complex designs. Cells only perceive their neighborhood.

Traditional CA requires hundreds of thousands of iterations to find equilibrium of field state variables such as displacements, strains, streses.

Hybrid cellular automata (HCA) solves the equilibrium of field state using finite elements, thus requiring way less iterations.

CA design update rules that have been used for static and dynamic analyses.

Discuss limitations of current design rules, challenge to improve them for crashworthiness.

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(at this point in the storyline, the reader should be able to guess what the contribution of the present MSc thesis will be)

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Adjusted research topic: design rules to maximize energy absorption within the hybrid cellular automata framework.

Recommendations for the "exploit" step:

• stop looking for new literature, unless clearly needed

• focus on identifying correlations between different reference sources, writing those in your notes

• focus on building your storyline

• focus on the identification of research gaps towards the end of your storyline

• adjust your research topic if necessary

• do not, at any cost, refine the text of your literature study report

• keep short notes of any insights and ideas that come related to your research objective and methodology, but do not spend time refining them

Converge

At the end of the "converge" step, your thesis should have a clear motivation ("why?"), and a clear research objective ("what?").

In order to achieve this objective you need to overcome a few challenges that can be written in the form of research questions.

Sometimes, you cannot take it for granted that answering a given research question leads to the objective. Then, you should frame this assumption that walking a specific path leads to the objective as a research hypothesis.

Research question

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↓  (sometimes only

↓    hypothetically connected)

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Research objective

All the hypotheses should be clearly tracked such that they can be tested by your methodology later.

In the "converge" step, it is also time to finalize your literature study report, although you should not yet spend too much time refining the text. You should do the final touches of your text only when you finalize the thesis.

Example based on MSc thesis of Aslan Bagirov, a former student. Look at his research questions and objective only:

Research question 1: How can detailed finite element aircraft crashworthiness assessment reliably be approximated by voxel-mesh models?

Research question 2: What is the effect of inter-level based bending energy on crashworthiness topology optimization using the hybrid cellular automata?

Research question 3: How can the bending-energy formulation in hybrid cellular automata improve the crashworthiness performance?

Research objective: To achieve aircraft crash topology optimization by developing a topology optimization method which includes plastic hinge formation.

Note that the research questions mention voxel-based models that are used in hybrid cellular automata, and optimization based on bending energy. Looking only at the research questions and research objective there is a hidden hypothesis that relates bending energy maximization with better crashworthiness. This must be made explicit:

Hypothesis: Bending energy optimization will lead to plastic hinge formation in structures to improve crashworthiness.

Testing hypotheses could become the most important part of your thesis, leading to a higher level of understanding that would allow you to formulate better hypotheses, depending on your research outcomes.

In academia, it is common that what is published in peer-reviewed journals are the refined hypotheses obtained after many internal updates, such that this process of evaluating and testing hypotheses often goes underappreciated. 

Recommendations for the "converge" step:

• focus on defining your research objective and research questions

• make all hypotheses explicit and keep track of them

• refine the text of your literature study report, but do it efficiently and leave final touches to when you finalize the thesis

Your methodology

Your methodology must be aligned your literature study. The methods and study cases selected by you must create situations and opportunities that will help you to answer your research questions. 

I will exemplify based on the MSc thesis of Aslan Bagirov, a former student. Let's look at the different research questions.

Research question 1:

How can detailed finite element aircraft crashworthiness assessment reliably be approximated by voxel-mesh models?

Methodology aligned with research quesiton 1:

The methodology should include one or more comparisons between a voxel-mesh and other reference model, which could be based on shell elements, solid elements etc. This comparison should focus on crashworthiness-related outputs to accurately answer the research question, such as the total energy absorbed in both the reference and voxel-mesh models, or the displacement/acceleration time history obtained at a given point of interest.

coming soon

The dopamine cycle, make it work in your favour

Dopamine is essential for many brain functions, from motor skills to motivation and mood regulation.

The reward and pleasure cycle, driven by dopamine, plays a significant role in the formation of bad habits, which can prevent you from completing your master’s research.

Dopamine is released when you engage in activities that bring immediate pleasure or satisfaction, such as checking your phone, browsing social media, consumig excitting or excessively funny content, playing games, watching seriers, movies, etc. Let's call all these "distracting behaviours". They provide a quick dopamine hit that makes you want to do it again, thus reinforcing the distracting behaviour.

Research is difficult, challenging, requires sustained effort, and has delayed gratification. Tasks like reading the literature, conducting a mathematical derivation, writing a thesis or conducting experiments might feel overwhelming or tedious. To avoid the discomfort, your brain may push you toward easier, more pleasurable activities that trigger dopamine release. This avoidance strengthens the habit of procrastination.

As you continue indulging in distracting behaviors (e.g., checking your phone or watching videos etc), the cycle of dopamine reinforcement continues, making it harder to focus on your research. The brain becomes conditioned to seek out distractions whenever a task feels hard, forming a habit that undermines your productivity.

Once your brain associates higher dopamine release with less productive activities, you've entered a vicious dopamine-driven cycle. In this cycle, your ability to focus on long-term goals diminishes. Being imersed in this pattern significantly limits your ability to make meaningful contributions to society, including completing your MSc thesis.

At this point, there is a chance that you are feeling bad about your own distracting behaviour. Thus, what can you do to be able to make great contributions to society?

coming soon