Key Lessons from Writing my MSc Thesis
To be sincere, I was one of the very few lucky ones who spoke with a potential supervisor once, got accepted to be their project student almost immediately and didn’t have to change project topic. No thanks to COVID19, most of my colleagues had to change their research methodology or come up with a completely different topic or supervisor. The structure of my research didn’t really have that much of a change. So, yea, I was lucky.
This means I must have had it all figured out and had ample time to do everything I had to do, especially because our project submission deadline was extended, right? No! However, I must admit that I had enough time because I knew what my research was going to be about since November or December 2019 and the project wasn’t due to kick-off until March or April 2020. I thought I had it all figured out, but I didn’t and that’s why I’m writing this article so I can point out what might be the “wrong way”, for you to learn from some of my mistakes and avoid such pitfalls yourself .
First, I understood the specifics of my research; it was a whole lot of economics, so much data cleaning and working with big data (scariest size of data I’ve ever had to work with), descriptive statistics and conceptualizing my research from a One Health perspective. Period! I knew these, I understood all of them. So, where did I fall behind? Data! I worked with data that wasn’t collected by me and I didn’t bother to ask the very important questions about the data collected before I started my work. How was the data collected? How were the study participants selected or what were the criteria used for participant selection? Why was the study site selected? Who collected the data?
These questions should be asked early on. I was neck-deep into my research report when I saw that my Methods chapter was going to be empty because I only had the data, had an idea of what had been done, knew what I did, but not the specifics of the data collected. It took me weeks to get answers to my questions because the data wasn’t collected by one person. Which brings me to another question: Were there collaborators for the data collection? Who were the collaborators? What institution(s) were they from?
Understanding the specifics of the data you’re using for your research is very crucial to your Methods section. This is an advanced research work, completely different from what you did during your undergraduate thesis, hence, you have to be thorough with it. A good Methods section is not only good for your grades, it also helps you as the researcher to own your work. It helps you to interpret your Results better, leading to a robust Discussion.
Another lesson is this: Don’t assume that you have everything figured out and shift the core of the research towards the deadline. That happened to me. I analysed my data quite early, that’s after I had spent some time transferring data from physical tables into Excel tables and cleaning the data, so I was ready to kick-ass with my work. My data analysis informed the parameters and values I would build my economic models around, so I kind of had it in control. And that was it. I dwelt so much on “I’ve got this in control” for weeks, started working on other sections of my thesis report and didn’t bother to “see” exactly what I thought I had in control. This is a tricky pitfall; mentally noting what you need to get done without actually delving into the task.
When I decided to work on “what I had in control”, I saw I had nothing in control! I had so many missing values! Some parameters needed for the economic models were not part of the data collected! I began to panic. How was I going to get data on morbidity rate of a disease, milk quantity produced by lactating dams in healthy and sick state? How would I bridge the gap? I was in a big mess, and in retrospect, if I had got the specifics of the data collected, and delved into the core of the research immediately after my data analysis, I would have seen the missing gaps many weeks before I actually saw them! And that’s a huge lesson for me. Don’t assume you’ve got it all sorted, until you have SEEN that everything you need is sorted.
In addition, if it’s your first post-graduate degree, nobody expects you to be an island of knowledge. Ask questions from your supervisor, and from people around. I spent so many weeks trying to figure things out on my own rather than asking questions. It depends on the supervisor, I agree, but that’s why they’re there to supervise you. If only I had found out early on that some values crucial to my economic models were missing, informed my supervisor immediately, I would have saved myself the heartache and anxiety of realising I had missing values just 3 weeks to the submission deadline. You can also ask questions from your colleagues or senior colleagues. Someone might just have an idea or point you in the right direction.
I need to state that having a general document where you can put notes about the literature you’re reading is a good strategy. I noticed that for essays I had written in the past which I adopted this method for, I had strong grades in them (e.g. a 5.0/5.0 grade in a course). This strategy involves reading wide — many articles — and deliberately writing a summary or key points from each paper/article. When I was done reading all the articles, then I went back to group the notes I had written per topic or sub-topic. For example if I wrote certain points from A’s article which relate to some points in D’s article, I grouped those points and made sure to reference them right there (so I wouldn’t fall into the trap of having very good points but not knowing who to cite). This strategy is also very good for critical thinking. Your notes help you to see how what someone wrote about a certain topic differs from what another person wrote. Comparing and contrasting from literature would be so easy if you did this.
Finally, this is a good one, and I want to encourage you to do it too: Go to bed knowing you tried your BEST for that day. My new favourite quote is “Carpe diem” and it means urging someone to make the most of the present time. Seize the day!
