5 Useful Tips for writing your bachelor thesis

The idea for this article came with my girlfriend having to write her bachelors thesis in Business Management. From the very beginning she was desperate about the task and did not know where to start and what to do. Holding a major in history and a minor in political sciences I was the first one whose advice she sought.

So to all the desperate students that are worrying about their thesis and its result here are my five important advices to manage the situation and get through it with a good grade:

1. Start starting

It’s an old truism, but it’s true: every path starts with the first step. It sounds odd, but the most important thing writing your thesis is to start at all. Procrastination is your major enemy on the road to success. So don’t waste your time watching TV or surfing on 9Gag — start writing your thesis!

2. Make your own writing schedule

The major task of writing a thesis is to finish it in a defined period of time. No matter whether you have 8, 12 or even more weeks — you have to plan how to use your time. Many will now say: I can manage my time without writing a schedule, I keep every deadline in my mind. But it is not that easy at all. The biggest advantage of a written schedule is that it shows you the major milestones of your thesis and your available time at a glance. So start recording your own schedule with a calendar template. In it, pin down the most important steps of work to finish your thesis on time. Possible milestones could be: “Finish of literature search”, “Finish of reading phase”, “Start of textualisation”, “Finish of textualisation”, “Revision I”, “Revision through friends and relatives”, “Revision II”, “buffer time” (There always happens something unexpected!).

3. Research is key to success

After having finished your schedule the motto is: in medias res. So start doing the research for your thesis. First, get an overview about the research instruments you can use: your universities library with its digital catalogue, some meta catalogues (which give you the possibility to search multiple catalogues at one time), databases and other online sources. If you find something you think could be important for your work, write it down directly into your bibliography. 
Don’t question yourself if you have problems finding the right books and articles: it takes some time to get where you want. Three aspects are key to finding the right literature:

1. Search not only for books but also for articles in journals.

2. Search for literature that has been published recently. You can use its bibliography to find important material on the topics.

3. Vary your search keywords to find new literature.

4. The hermeneutic circle

After you have found some literature, start reading it. This is the easiest way to get new ideas and find even new literature that you can add to your bibliography.

This process is called the hermeneutic circle: if you start working on your thesis you have a certain preconception of the topic. This preconception shapes the way you read and understand every text. The lecture of other texts changes the way you think about your topic and supply you with new information. These new ideas you got reading help you to shape your own thesis. The new ideas and interpretations in turn create a new need for literature you can research and add. This circular process recurs multiple times while writing your thesis. It helps you to intensify your ideas and your understanding of the topic.

5. Split your work into manageable parts

If you look at all the work you have to do to finish your thesis at once it quickly becomes an overwhelming and almost impossible task. But don’t fall into despair. Split your work into manageable parts. The easiest way to do this is to make a table of contents for your thesis. This index shows the structure of your thesis and its subitems. If you already have done your research you can now match your literature to your different subitems — and quickly see that the big amount of books and articles is reduced to three to four per item. Now you can start writing the subitems step by step and put them together to your thesis.

I hope my five tips have helped you writing your own bachelor thesis. In the next weeks I will add further articles about how to research, write and revise a text.