HOW TO WRITE AN EXCELLENT MASTERS THESIS | Dissertation tips that got me a distinction

hey everyone in this video i will share with you guys how to write an excellent thesis so here's the thing recently i graduated from the university of bristol

and my dissertation grade there was 86 and i got my distinction and i was very happy about it and my supervisor was even telling me that my work is publishable wow

and in this video i want to share some tips that helped me personally to receive these high grades [Music]

so why i think that my advice would be of interest to you first when i was doing my dissertation i was not staying alone i had my family with me so it was taking some of the time

plus i was doing like two hours of volunteering work during the weeks and just to warm you up even more here i need to tell that i'm not a native english speaker plus i

was working 20 hours a week during working on my dissertation plus i finished my dissertation one month before the deadline whoa

this result is quite good it was quite good in fact the university of bristol staff thought that it would be a good idea if i came to university and just shared my own experience with

the students there and which i did and i believe students loved it so let's start first of all i'm gonna speak about my own dissertation very briefly because there are some neat details in there that i wanted to

demonstrate then i will touch on some planning techniques that i personally was using then i want to share with you guys my favorite tool that i have come up with which

helps me personally whenever i work with any kinds of texts okay this is really beautiful i'm gonna share it with you then i will also touch on some software

and also i will speak about how to be a good team with your supervisor so just to quickly outline you know the formal side of things i graduated from the university of

bristol in 2019 and my course was msc and education leadership and policy and i graduated with distinction and here's my diploma just to make sure you

got it and so yeah and my dissertation was this a case study of the russian university 2035

an innovation opposed to the traditional university and obviously my thesis was in social science so let's go to the logic of the research your

dissertation needs to be based on a very firm research question so here's the thing research question is like half of your success okay so it's critical it's very very important to find

a great research question in my case the research question was how is university 2035 constructed and positioned publicly as a new kind of university

since it is how is university 2035 how it is case study intrinsic one constructed and positioned

i cannot count anything here so this is a qualitative research then it says publicly that's why i was using discourse analysis

and as a new kind of university so this means automatically that in my literature review i was investigating this topic what means

a new kind of university so what means a traditional university so this is what i was doing okay obviously you will not choose this topic right but here's the thing your research question actually has to

outline everything your approach your methodology even the you know focus of your literature review and so on so as i said research question is very very

very important so pay much attention to it chapter 2 literature review i was speaking about what a university is what models of university are there chapter three was dealing with

methodology so obviously it's case study data collection issues i didn't go and survey people you know i just worked with documents

and here i need to tell that this was a very smart solution if you want to go and survey people these automatically means that

you will spend like a lot of time on it so if you don't have too much time what you could do is you might design your research so that you wouldn't need to go

and survey people but instead you would be able to work with documents and in a way it does help to save time [Music]

so right let's talk about some planning issues okay so first of all here you need to understand that your dissertation is a huge project you need to use your project management skills

i know that some people do not have these kind of experience you know project management skills and that's why they are struggling when they need to deal with this huge bulk of

text and here my advice to you would be if you have any opportunities to gain this project management skills somehow

do some project work somewhere beforehand you know if you do that it would be so so much easier for you to manage your dissertation so good

research proposal is the key you know the research proposal is a very brief document that you prepare before you actually dive into your dissertation

and it's critical to work on your research proposal the best way possible you know prepare it because it becomes a draft for your dissertation so this cannot be overrated

another thing that i wanted to share here is that you need to make use of your essays you know if you are now working on dissertation then it means that before that

you were working on your essays right so in my case i had written six essays already at the university of bristol these helps because

you know your own speed you know how many words you can write per day and so these kind of things you know so overall you know when you go to do

your musters pay very close attention to nailing your essays because the experience that you gain there will be very very helpful in your dissertation i hope this does make sense and not too

obvious and also i wanted to show you the gun chart so this is actually my gun chart okay so for those of you who don't know you can

actually go and google it gun chart is a tool that helps you to actually manage your projects again this comes from you know project management and here

at the left uh here are the stages that i had for my dissertation you see the stages then you can see the tasks within each stage there

and also to the right you can see that there are the dates here may june july and august so the blue part here means the actual time

that you need to plan for your you know certain parts of your document so here for example in chapter one literature review you can see that

i gave myself two weeks to identify key texts which would be relevant for my topic and then i gave myself three weeks to read them all and then some important milestones here

are shown in red you see so here was my first deadline by the end of may i had to send my draft to rafael rafael

was my supervisor he was simply the best and here you can see that there is this waterfall logic here that all the processes are going one after another

and here i was planning to submit my dissertation by the end of august because 27th of august was my birthday and in fact i submitted it on

like 10th of august i believe plus starting from july i was working 20 hours per week so this

was the gun chart okay this is really really helpful and now i'm gonna share with you guys my favorite tool for working with

texts okay so this is a tool that i came up with myself at least i didn't see anyone using it okay so first i will just you know clear your mind okay

imagine this let's say you have just five words to describe what you did yesterday what would you say i would say something like

yesterday i worked during the day okay so this was a short message okay but let's say i'm given some more time to describe what i did yesterday okay

so in that case i would say you know what yesterday i was sitting at my desk and i was working remotely because we've been working remotely

for 10 months already because of the cavite 19 and so on far more detailed description of the idea right but then

imagine i have five minutes to tell you about my yesterday in this case i would go in very very tiny details oh you know i was sitting there and then i was hungry then i

thought that oh i should go and need something blah blah blah so there are lots of details here okay this is the pyramid or maybe a triangle whatever you like so this means

that the upper side of it gives you less details or less depth say in the very top of it was my you know five words speech i was working yesterday so

this is it but say you are giving some more time and then the you know bottom side of the triangle gives you a bit more

opportunities to go into detail so here for example you can see that it gives me 50 words so

say these parts mean that there are some chunks of your text right some introduction and then maybe a literature review and so on and so on so when you were working on your essay

and say you were given 3 000 words then you still would need to stick to this structure right you need to use the introduction you would need to use the literature review then some findings and some

conclusion right there are still same part same structure but the thing is you only have three thousand words

but in your master's thesis you have lots more words right so it becomes just bigger the triangle becomes bigger and it goes into far

more details but the structure of it stays just the same so introduction is still there literature review is still there the findings are still there

and the methodology is somewhere there and the conclusion is still there right but since it goes like this it becomes wider the more it goes down the wider it

becomes right and this is the way it works so imagine the structure itself is just the same and you need to stick to this structure

i hope that it does make sense to you but this helps really really so much to you so why is this important why you need to stick to this tool why i personally

benefit from this tool a lot because when i'm writing a text if i know that say my overall word number is 10

000 then proportionally i say my introduction must be a thousand words then i understand

that in thousand words i can only go to a certain level of details i cannot go in too much details okay but if it would be

say a phd dissertation a huge one then my introduction there would be like a small book you know so this is it this is really really important because when you're writing a text

this tool helps you to you know identify the depth of your text in how much details you're going into so this is like really really critical this is very very important

i'm not sure that i made it clear but i do hope that you understood it because to me personally as i said this is a very beautiful tool it helps you to work on your structure

at the same time understanding how much details you can afford with your given number of words this is beautiful [Music]

so here guys i want to share with you the tool that i personally use whenever i need to make this you know chunks of structure of any kind of texts okay

so the tool is called workflowy and here is my folder of university of bristol and here you can see the list of my essays that i was doing and just to make

clear how i was using it see here for example there are some strange numbers over here you see some numbers and this was

my education policy essay and here's the dissertation you can dive into it you can dive into it like this and here's my dissertation okay here you can see

the word numbers that i was planning to have when i was planning my dissertation okay planning is critical almost thousand words for introduction

4200 words for literature review and then 2000 for methodology and so on so this was my first planning so when

you do this you need to have this design in your mind okay the introduction has to be a relatively small part of the dissertation right it doesn't have to be like 90 percent of your dissertation so

you keep it small right and you allocate a certain number of words especially for this part okay so the italic numbers here as you can see are the

blend numbers and in bold you can see here the actual number of words that i ended up having so you can see that i had planned for the 200 words for the literature review but in fact when i started

writing it it was so so meaty that i couldn't help but have it just bigger than it was planned methodology on the other hand was just a

bit smaller than planned so this is something that i wanted to share with you then you go into details you can unpack the structure of your dissertation and

in every single part of it here you just outline the key points okay and this site workflow it helps you to do that perfectly you just enter like this and here's a new bullet point created

and you just write something something so here is it another bullet point or if you want to go go there and go into details

detail one detail two detail three and then you can hide them so the thing is if i'm working on my introduction i just go into introduction and all the other

parts just go away so that i could just focus on my introduction okay then you just go back you finished your introduction i don't need this

i just delete it okay i close it back and then you dive into your literature review so in your literature review again you use the same triangle technique

here you can see how many layers are in there you know you go deeper and deeper and deeper and then when you're done with the literature review you finish it again you close it like this

and then you dive into your methodology yeah there we go here same structure again see the same numbers why it's important okay because you know what other students did

some some of them obviously they start writing their introduction they finish writing their introduction and then it's just very big and then they go into

the literature view and then it's even bigger and then they have only finished introduction literature review but they are almost out of the words so what they need to do is they need to

go back and they need to rewrite the introduction to make it slimmer you know and the literature review the same they need to make it twice

less and you know all these real writings going back and forth is taking so so much time but in my case since i had

already this structure there it helped me to stick to this structure and gave me this structure to organize myself not to go into much details

not to underwrite anything so this was something that really helps me write it and i did it very very very fast you finish it you know that it takes the

part that it needs to take you know it doesn't get any bigger than that so this is really really helpful and another piece of software that i highly recommend for you to use is the reference manager

software there are lots of them out there but i personally was using mandalay i liked it a lot this is the site of mendeley and you just basically go there download

it or you can use it online just sign in and so on i was storing all my references in there and it is very very handy and it saves you so much time

[Music] let's also speak about how to be a good team with your supervisor okay so first of all here i need to tell that

the key principle here is respect because your supervisor he or she is a great scholar most probably and you need to understand that they don't have too much time actually the

very least thing that you can do to respect your supervisor is to make your documents easy to understand structured and beautiful okay this is my draft of research proposal okay this is

the name of it and here's the introduction and this was the table that i came up with and i was using it to structure my own thoughts and questions here as

you can see so here are the documents that i was providing my supervisor with and here you can see that it's very neat it's very structured and it's very easy

to read and understand and it was very easy for my supervisor to just leave his comments here you see hi rafael if you're watching this i'm very very grateful for your support

during my dissertation he's so cool whenever you prepare any document or any email which you are sending to your supervisor just make sure you spend 10 20 more

minutes for your document plus when you are structuring it it actually helps you yourself to structure your thoughts you know so it really does help a lot and also i need to tell that you need to

get prepared for all your meetings with your supervisor very very well because usually you will have very limited number of meetings it might be two or

three meetings and this means that all these meetings have to be a very good input into your dissertation so get prepared and here i'll come back to my research question advice

uh remember i was telling you that you better choose a topic that you are very curious about so you better do it like that because if your supervisor feels

that the topic that you are focusing on is of interest to you then it will be easier for him or her to help you because they can feel it that you are interested in your topic and you're just working on

it and they try to support you in the best way possible and the last thing i'd like to mention here and probably it's the most important thing when dealing with your supervisor is that

your thesis your dissertation is your responsibility it's not your supervisor's responsibility he's not your dad or mom he or she is not there to do everything for you

and this is very important because some of the students tend to behave like kids as if the supervisor is there to do everything for them but that's not the case you need to be very very

proactive there and since you have reached this late point of my video why don't you subscribe to my channel and here you can watch my other development tips

and here you can see my school tour videos and they're really fun i'll see you in my next videos bye

[Music] you