One of they key reasons to why I feel it is important for a (Master’s) student to understand this aspect is because there is a strong tendency (from some students) to believe that “doing interviews is easy”. Such students tend to believe that they could write a thesis by asking to their external/company supervisor some questions. The overall philosophy is the following: “the thesis has a (research) question that I have to answer. If my external supervisor answers it for me and I write down the answer, my thesis is finished”.

Ok ok, perhaps I am exaggerating, but I guess you can grasp the idea here and why it is important to understand when you should use interviews for your thesis. Clearly, if you tend to have the mindset that I described above, there is not much that I can do for helping you.

In information management (IM) a theory usually belongs to one of the following categories:

• Variance Theory: Focus on why something is happening
• Process Theory : Focus on how something is happening
• Taxonomy Theory: Categorize and classify what is happening
• System Theory: Components that a part of a system can be better understood in the context of the all system
• Design Science Theory: Develop and validate knowledge in a prescriptive manner

According to Wikipedia, a case study refers to an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. Case studies are a particular way to validate a Variance Theory (most of the time) or a Taxonomy, or (eventually) a Process theory. In other words, you want to understand relationships between concepts that are part of your theory.

The above mentioned theories are usually expressed as relationships among constructs. A construct is a theoretical concept, theme, or idea based on empirical observations. It’s a variable that’s usually not directly measurable. If you want to know more please consider looking at what is a construct from a philosophical point of view and the importance of construct validity.

Not all case studies are suitable for being conducted using interviews; other data collection methods can be used, too. You should consider using interviews in a situation where your research question can best be answered with detailed verbal data reflecting the perspectives and experiences of a small sample of individuals. Moreover, you should not conduct interviews to have your participants answer your research question. A research question is not something you ask from your interviewees, it is something you ask from your data consisting of interviews.

In other words, if you want to use a case study approach using interviews, you need to be sure of the following:

1. Your constructs cannot be measured in a quantitative way
2. Nobody has explored before the definitions of the constructs that could be a part of your theory
3. There is a lack of previous qualitative and quantitative studies and thus, an explorative approach is needed

Note that all the points imply that you will conduct a preliminary literature review for ensuring that a different approach can not be used and for defining the research gap that you will fill. By doing that you will observe that many of your ideas should probably be validated in a different manner than using interviews.

Should you use an interview-based case study for your thesis? It depends and a case study is not synonymous of interviews. In many cases, an interview-based investigation is suitable if you do not have any other way to prove your theory/hypothesis or answer your research question. What I mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg and if you want to pursue a research following a case study approach (that uses interviews), I encourage you to watch the following lecture by Dr. Amiri:

You may find yourself in a situation where (i) after reading this post, (ii) performing your preliminary literature review, and (iii) watching the video above you still believe that an interview-based case study is the most appropriate approach. The next steps that you need to consider include considering (a) how to collect your data, (b) how to structure your interviews and (c) how to analyze your data. Once you have done all of that you should be able to smile after looking at the image below!

Finally, I would suggest to check this article from Dr. Toivonen where she discusses quality in qualitative research and gives a few tips for improving your work.

Should you use an #interview based #casestudy for your #Thesis ? A simple checklist. #thesiswriting
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Note from Dr. Toivonen: You don’t need to consider interviews and case studies as the last option only after you’re sure that your research question cannot be answered in a quantitative manner. Qualitative and quantitative approaches can also co-exist and enrich each other. However, I would recommend you not treating interviews as “the easy way out” from your thesis journey; conducting an interview study well is time consuming and complicated. I would also like to point out that replicating previous interview-based studies is possible in qualitative research, but that is a challenging endeavor because you have to formulate your research question carefully and do nuanced, sophisticated comparisons. Replicating does not mean repeating, and therefore, is best left for more experienced researchers at the PhD level and beyond.

This article (Should You Use a Case Study for your Thesis in Information Management?) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Javed Khan

Business Needs

1. Improving the visibility of data in a global manufacturer’s head office. Current businesses have a plethora of data and analytics, critical for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. Interactive displays in an office can support that decision making process. For this assignment you will investigate user needs of senior management in Sappi’s head office. Based on that investigation you will design and implement dashboards to be displayed in a high-tech interactive display in Sappi’s head office in Brussels, Belgium.
2. Improving everyday work-related chores. In this assignment you will investigate how office workers deal with IT systems for completing chores such as filling expenses. Based on that investigation you will propose a system to make such processes more efficient.

The Horizon Europe funding creates opportunities for Sappi to both fund and solve, through collaborations with other complementing organizations. However, in our experience in trying to partner with other organizations to pursue funding on digital initiatives, we have found a luck of detailed use-cases, which would the basis of filtering the proposed calls for funding.

Main Activities

• Conduct user research such as interviews and contextual inquiry.
• Qualitative and quantitative analysis.
• Design of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Implementation of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Investigation of modern IT systems.

Success Metrics

1. Dashboards are user-friendly and informative,
2. User findings are thorough, actionable and convincing,
3. Suggestions for improvements are actionable and convincing,
4. student’s attitude: quick response time, proactiveness and independence.

Company and Team

The internship will take place within the Digital Transformation (DT) team of Sappi Europe, in Brussels, Belgium.

Sappi is a global company focused on providing dissolving pulp, paper pulp, paper-based and biorefinery solutions to its customers in over 150 countries. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Sappi Europe is the leading European producer and supplier of coated fine paper, packaging and specialty papers.

More about the company at: https://www.sappi.com/

Company coach

Dr.ir. Javed Khan is Head of UX in Sappi. Furthermore, he serves as an associate editor at the Behavior and Information Technology journal. Javed holds a PhD. and a P.D.Eng. degree from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and a MSc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. In the past he held the position (tenured) of assistant professor at TU/e’s department of Industrial Design and before that of senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences. Finally, he gained industrial R&D experience, in design and HCI research positions, at Philips Research, Vodafone and Greece’s Computer Technology Institute.

More about the coach at: http://khan.gr/

Master #thesis in #DigitalTransformation in SAPPI: a global manufacturer of sustainable materials at TiU.
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

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A navigation test is important for the following two reasons:

• It is hard to structure writing coherently: It hardly happens at the first attempt. Therefore, a proper assessment of the consistency of the structure of your manuscript can help to identify areas of improvement as well as critically reassess what has been written.
• So far you probably wrote your thesis (following an IMRaD structure) thinking that your reader will read it from the beginning to the end. Also this will happen, it is usually not the first way your reader will approach your masterpiece. Probably he/she will jump around in search of information in order to get a feeling of what you did and only afterwards will decide to read it in a more complete manner.

What I am suggesting is a test that can assess the status of your work from the point of view of the reader and the aspects described before. You can do this navigation test alone but it works better if you are doing it with a friend, maybe with a fellow student that is familiar with your field of study but not with your thesis.

The test is relatively simple but requires you to take notes and keep a humble attitude as you will find unexpected surprises. These are the steps:

1. Meet with a friend that is familiar with your field of study but not with your work.
2. After a drink of their choosing, give him/her your thesis outline (the index that contains the subsections as well). Make sure that each subsection has the pictures and the tables that you would like to have in your final thesis. Alternatively, you can share your entire work but make sure that he/she will not spend more than 10 minutes browsing the document.
3. Tell him/her that you will ask her a few questions and that he/she can use the manuscript for answering. He/she will not have to retrieve the complete answer but tell you to which section(s) he/she will jump to search for more information.
4. Take notes on how they react to the questions and the sections they decide to visit. You should not give any suggestions and you should repeat this process for each question.

Here you can find an initial set of questions:

• What it this thesis about?
• What is the research question?
• Did you collect your own data or use an existing dataset?
• What kind of methodology did you use for validating your research questions?
• How can you reuse my data for your own thesis/research?
• Can this research be considered concluded or is further research needed?
• Who else has done research in a similar topic?

If you have time, you can also ask the following questions:

• What can you learn if you read the thesis?
• How can you get access to my data?
• What code/tool did I use for analyzing my data?
• Does this thesis have industrial relevance?
• Did you do an internship in conjunction of this thesis?
• If someone does not have time to read the whole thesis, can you give this person a short description of it? (Follow up question: If someone already read the executive summary, can you give them a short version of the thesis that is a bit longer than the summary?

Now it is time to check your notes and critically assess (with or without the help of your friend) the following points:

• How easy was it for him/her to find the answers?
• Was the selected section(s) the most appropriate one? Why?
• Does the text of the selected section(s) deliver(s) the answer in a simple and complete manner?
• Do the identified sections live up to other expectations of the reader?

Remember that you are suppose to take the perspective of your friend. They were confronted for the first time with your thesis and this is what they understood.

I am sure that this exercise will give you the opportunity to critically reflect on your work and implement the proper corrective actions. If you have the time, you can repeat the exercise with a different friend.

The Navigation Test: a simple test that can improve the quality of your #writing in you #Thesis or scientific #paper. #writingtips
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This article (Put your Thesis to a Test: the Navigation Test) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

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1: Outline and indexes

The structure of your document plays an important role and is often the first thing that your reader checks. Therefore, it is your chance to make a good impression. Consider the first level index and the second level index separately.

• First level index: make sure that it follows a variation of the IMRaD structure and consider making an outline of the whole manuscript in the first chapter. Take all the space that you need, in particular if you are not bounded by word limits. Make a dedicated section in Chapter 1 with a bullet list, one for each chapter, appendix included. In addition, describe the content in 1-3 sentences.
• Second level index: look at the title of each chapter and each section and imagine that they are the only thing that will be read of your thesis. How easy is it to follow the story that they are telling? Is the story and the logic easy to grasp or is something missing? Should you merge together or divide one or more sections?

2: Table and pictures

Tables and pictures are also part of this writing rules checklist. As matter of fact, after the index, they are the second thing that will be noticed by your reader and are as important as your outline. Each table and picture should have a text description. No exception. In addition, when describing these items consider the following “3 layers” of comments:

• Layer 1: present the obvious. Imagine describing a table to a blind person: What is in the x? What is in the y? What is the meaning of each column of the table?
• Layer 2: present what is objective. In other words, present the facts. Can we observe a correlation between X and Y? Is A greater than B?
• Layer 3: present what is logical. In other words, present your interpretation of the facts. What can we conclude from the fact that A is greater than B? What are the implications of X and Y being correlated? Here you can be moderately speculative and give your best, educated guess.

Whenever possible, make your own pictures (the same applies to tables) instead of reusing the pictures that you find in other papers. This does not imply that you have to “regenerate” the same pictures. Re-elaborate them and make sure that they represent your own original thinking. If you end up using a picture or table that has been published in another paper or book, give credit correctly.

In addition, assuming that you already did the work mentioned at the first point of this article, look at the table and the title in conjunction with the subsection where they are presented. Do they match well? Do they complement each other?

3: Bullet Lists

Bullet lists are very important in your scientific report. You can use them to simplify and structure the text that you are writing. Using bullet lists will make sections become more logically coherent. At the same time, you should resist the urge to create sections that contain only bullet lists. They should always be surrounded by “plain text” that describes why that particular list/categorization is important. If you find yourself in some sort of “writer’s block”, start by introducing the bullet list and then provide its point.

4: Appendixes

The thesis should contain all the material that is necessary for documenting your scientific claims. At the same time, there is always some preparatory work or test work that you performed for initial validation of your ideas or to clarify to yourself the intermediate steps. Appendixes are perfect places for this: Carefully assess all the material that you have produced to your thesis and try to see how it could be packaged in an appendix. In other words, if you have done the work and it is some how related to the main claims of your thesis, why not show it? At the same time, you should consider an appendix like any other chapter and not a place where to park pictures and tables. Consequently, all the previous remarks of this article apply to them as well. In addition, every appendix must be refereed in one or more chapter of your thesis for further explanation.

5: No empty section allowed

This point is relatively simple and clear: no empty sections in your thesis. In other words: (for example) do not start a chapter with “section 2.1” but use the section “2.0” for describing what the chapter is about. Maybe you can give an outline of the follow-up sections here?

6: Consider a grammar check, style check and plagiarism check

A plagiarism check is the process of locating instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement within a work or document. There are several resources freely available in the internet: Use one or two. Make sure that the content of the chapters and the appendixes is not flagged. However, you should not worry about references and/or portions of code.

In addition, you can easily find tools in the internet that check style and grammar, and some may also be available at your library. I would suggest you to spend a few hours with them and try to reflect on the changes that they recommend. Consider their output as an opinion and an opportunity to reflect on how you wrote certain aspects of your work. Not all the suggestions are good, but some may be worth incorporating.

A Final comment on writing rules and next steps

Reflecting on the writing rules presented in this article will help you in structuring your work and making it more accessible to your reader. I would encourage to implement all of them and take a 24h break from writing. Then, you can revisit these points one more time and see if you still would like to make some changes. After a couple of iterations I would suggest to perform a “navigability test” as described in this article.

Simple #writing rules that can improve the quality of your #Thesis or scientific #paper. #writingtips
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You may receive support from proper offices at the university, open source initiatives, as well as from the web. Here, I will share my favorite set of resources. Some are strictly related to the university where I am currently working, however, many institutions offer similar services.

Support for writing and related work:

• Universities have dedicated facilities (in Tilburg it is called Scriptorium) to help with writing assignments, such as a paper, a report, or your thesis. These facilities offer individual support for writing in both the language of your bachelor/master’s thesis (whether it is Dutch, French, Finnish, or something else) and English. You can also get help with searching for relevant background literature, consulting specific databases, and with questions about quoting and source referencing. Do not misunderstand me, they will not do the work for you but they can provide you with guidance and feedback.
• Libraries have a collection of best practices on how to reference sources in the proper manner and avoid plagiarism. Ref Cite is the one of the Library of Tilburg University: It is a self-study tutorial explaining the why and how of working with sources in academic writing.
• Libraries (here you can find the link to the one of TiU) are also the natural go-to place for retrieving material for your thesis. Nowadays your library is probably digital and offers your remote access via dedicated VPN. Nevertheless, your resources may also be available in paper format.

Support for Software and IT in General

• Some software is expensive, some is difficult to configure, and some has special licenses for students/researchers/faculties member. The IT support (here the link to the one in TiU) may help you in navigating this labyrinth and solve the various software (and hardware) related issues.
• Data are an important ingredient for your thesis. Your library (link again to the TiU one) may have access to particular packages (datasets) that are not available in a common setting.
• Data are also available in the web. Possible sources include the one mentioned in this post as well the datasets that I recently released.

IT Resources Offered for Free to Students

Being a student is (sometimes) an asset. Many companies and no-profit associations offer special support to students for experimenting and conducting their researches. Here there are two that I believe should be mentioned:

• Amazon Education: offers for free both classes as well as free computing resources for practicing cloud computing and related skills.
• GithHub education pack: offers an entire set of IT based services as well as the GithHub pro version for free to students that apply for this program.

Online Communities in the Web

Online communities may also be a source of support, mentorship, and exchange of ideas. Here are two that you should consider joining:

• StackeXchange (here you can see my profile) contains many communities that can be helpful for programming, configuring applications, as well as handling research in general.
• AskAcademia in Reddit is also a nice (virtual) place for exchanging opinions of academia-related issues.

Problems in Organizing Your Time and Delays

Deviation from what is originally expected is more common than you can imagine. Universities usually offer dedicated facilities for covering these problems. In TiU, this is the case of the Dean of Students. This is where you can find tailored support in case personal circumstances cause unforeseen problems for you. You can also develop a personal roadmap or working/study schedule.

Personal Coaching and Mental Health in General

Let’s face it, Covid times are not easy for anybody. In this respect, universities are organizing services that are supporting the mental health of students and staff. If you are experiencing difficulties in focusing, you may contact a specialized service (again, here you can find the one of TiU as an example) that can offer tailored support for your specific issue.

Other Online Resources for Your Thesis

A bit of self-promotion here. I am curating a few guides with the aim of offering quick (but effective) tips and suggestions for delivering a good thesis. In particular, I would suggest you to look at:

• A curated set of articles for improving the various aspects of your thesis
• A curated set of articles for moving from “Script Programming” to Object Oriented Programming.

Your #Thesis will benefit from all the help that it can get. Here you can find who can help you and how.
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Adopting healthy scientific practices is essential for conducting good quality research. This may be intuitive but it is hard to achieve and does not happen naturally. This video from the Royal Society introduces the problem:

The term “replication crisis” emphasizes that replication, a corner stone in science, is often considered of secondary importance. If we want to fight this phenomena it is important to conduct research using practices that promote the possibility to do that.

The open science movement not only offers you a way to get credited for your work (see this post on open access for more), but also tries to solve the problem of replicability. It takes into account several aspects at the level of researchers, scientific venues, funding organizations, etc.

In this article, we will focus on aspects related to the way research is conducted and the direct implications (and advantages) for your thesis.

I am assuming that you are not interested in falsifying your data or following any other intentional malpractices. In case you wonder, if you get caught, you could face serious consequences that range from immediate nullification of your thesis to expulsion and/or immediate termination of your internship.

As a single researcher (or small group of researchers) your attention should go towards offering to other scientists the possibility to access the data that you used for the analysis as well as your procedures. This video explain in a funny way why:

In other words, these are a set of good research practices that you should take into account:

• Carefully describe the procedures that you followed for obtaining the data.
• Make your data publicly available so that other scientists can check what you are doing. This includes your mentor and your second reader.
• Document each step of the process in order to be able to share this information with fellow researchers.
• Disclose the meaning of each field in the data.
• Disclose and share the programming code that you used for developing the data as well as the analysis.

Adopting these practices has several direct benefits:

• Your supervisors and/or reviewers will be positively impressed and predispose towards a higher grade.
• You will obtain a (very) good grade independently from your findings. In fact, your thesis is not about your findings: Showing you capability to follow the scientific method is way more important.
• Your work could, starting from your data, be published in a relatively easy manner as a tangible follow up of your thesis. Thus, differentiating your CV from other graduated students.
• A fellow student could decide to continue your work. Thus, you will be able to leave something tangible after you, instead of having your thesis completely forgotten.

In a nutshell, the bottom line is that good research practices will give you a better grade.

In this article, I limited myself to describing the scientific practices that a single individual should follow in pursuing his/her thesis. Adopting a more transparent approach clearly has several benefits and a direct implication on your grade. However, the problem of replicability is bigger than it may look like from this post. It is taken into serious consideration by the entire scientific community. In case you are interested in knowing more, this video gives you a general (and insightful) view on the problem:

#good #research practices like the one promoted by #OpenScience and #OpenData lead to better grades for your #Thesis as well as to a better #Science and more visibility of your work via #openaccess.
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Your thesis has been successfully defended. What do to next? What about publish your thesis? The information that I am going to share are specific for my university. However, each university follow similar rules and procedure. Therefore, I will encourage you in doing your homework and find the particular specificity for you.

Why publishing your thesis?

Well, you have worked hard for your thesis, why should it become a forgot piece of paper? In addition, the good news is that there is not much work to do. Mainly is about following a procedure. Therefore most of the time you do not have anything to lose.

There may be specific cases where you may not want to publish your work. For example, if you developed your thesis in collaboration with a company, your external supervisor may prefer to keep the information. Maybe you deal with sensible data or company privileged information. In these cases, you may want to share your intention with both your internal and external supervisor. An open discussion may avoid unpleasant conversations.

How to publish your thesis?

Check with your library the specifics, most of the time is about just editing your front page and fill a couple of forms. For example these are the requirements in the library of Tilburg University:

• The thesis must have a cover page, title page and a table of contents
• The title page must contains the following information:
  • title (and possible subtitle)
  • full initials/first name, surname and (ANR) student’s registration number
  • date and year of graduation
  • name of graduation department
  • supervisor(s) full initials and surname
  • faculty name
• The pages of your thesis must be numbered
• The thesis that you will submitted must be one single pdf-file

Here you can find a link with more information (Tilburg University specific)

Should you made your thesis public?

This is up to you. By pubic I mean, available in the internet and searchable via google. On the other hand if you decide to keep it private, your work will be accessible via the university library. Each library has an internal search facility for accessing there databases. Most of the time they can be accessed only via VPN or physically at the library itself.

Here you can find a link to the thesis catalog for my university.

Publish your master #thesis using your #university #Library. Is free and will take #less then one hour!
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In summary

Publish your thesis is at almost zero work and there is a chance that it will be used by some of your present or future fellow students. Therefore you do not have much to lose and is mainly an upside.

In case you want to do a bit more these are a couple article that will help you:

• What will happen to your thesis and what you can do for influencing its visibility
• Consider publishing your thesis Open access for extra visibility
• Consider transforming your thesis in a scientific publication (Extra work will be needed)

This article (Publish Your Thesis in your University Library) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of posts at the following link:

The post Publish Your Thesis in your University Library appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

• What if you add one item at the beginning of your text?
• What if you cite a source multiple times?
• What if you need to change the format of the references?

The list of problems goes on and on, and the amount of sources that you intend to cite adds extra complexity.

There are several tools that could help you manage this complexity (for example Mendeley), as well as editors like Latex that are designed for this issue. However, in this article I would like to keep things as simple as possible.

Let’s consider the example of MS-Word and how it can help you. Even if what is going to follow is quite specific, similar considerations could be repeated for similar editors like Open office.

These links from the MS-World help center can guide you in how to add resources into your document as well as how to insert a reference:

• Add citations in a Word document
• Create a bibliography, citations, and references

These videos will give you an idea on how to add a reference.

Here is one on the potential of this feature:

This is just a possibility for improving your editing experience and focusing on what matters the most: your content. Please consider this article as the starting point instead of the final destination. There are plenty of possible way to collect and maintain your references and, in case you are not satisfied, you will easily find other ways to improve the efficiency in conducting this (boring) task.

As a final note, please keep in mind that managing references is a bit different then managing images and tables in your document. This video explains the differences (and repeats some of the information of the previous):

#HowTo use references in your #thesis or your scientific article. Save time and manage #complexity !
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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Omid Feyli

The “Customer Journey” refers to the process of measure, understand and analyze the interactions that a customer has with a particular brand or product. The candidate will devise difference and similarities of these techniques with the digital experience that the students have with the university. In particular, he/she will evaluate and analyze various approaches for measuring and enhancing the digital experience that the students have in interacting with the university in various phases of their studies. This thesis is not about interviewing students or send surveys around; it is way more concrete and data driven. Example of topic of interest includes:

• Data collection and quality
• Data enhancing using popular social networks and search engine (Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. )
• Data reporting and filtering.
• Digital Analytics

The candidate will propose alternatives and develop proof of concepts that will be evaluated by the marketing division for refining the “digital student journey” of the students of the university.

If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• A generic article in Wikipedia about the customer experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Digital Analytics, Digital Customer Journey, Digital Customer Experience, Data driven approach, touchpoint analysis 

A few resources for a practical understanding of the tools that may be used:

1. Google analytics academy: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/
2. Facebook for business: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn

This thesis is in conjunction with an internship at the marketing department of TiU, consequently your candidature will be subject to a scrutiny process that will proceed as follows:

Phase 1: Interested candidate should contact: Francesco Lelli (link) for a preliminary discussion of their ideas and the draft of a preliminarily proposal.

Phase 2: the candidate will be interviewed by a representative of the marketing department

Phase 3: If successful, the candidate will produce a full proposal for his/her thesis that will be submitted for a final go/no go evaluation.

Phase 4: the thesis and the internship will start as agreed by your supervisor and your mentor at the marketing department.

Note: this internship is remunerated and extra credits may be available upon a discussion with the head of the marketing division.

Master #thesis about digital student journey available at TiU. #DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

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First of all let’s start with what you achieved so far and congratulation for reaching this stage in your studies! This implies that you have a (more or less) clear idea on what you would like to do at the end of your thesis/studies and that you have a thesis topic that is triggering your curiosity and you would like to know more about. If that is not the case you may want to read this article that suggests you how to take the most from your thesis. Also, please note, this is not instructions on “how to write your thesis” but limits itself in the preparatory work that you need to do before start working at your thesis.

When interacting with your supervisor you have to understand the following:

• He/She is probably mentoring several students at the same time.
• He/She is probably more busy then should be and is probably dedicating  50-60 hours/week to his/her job.
• He/She maybe doing other things like teaching and research while supervising you.

Consequently, without a proper set of communication tools with your thesis supervisor, your email may be “lost in the chaos”. He/she may not read your emails and attachments with various version of your thesis may just “contribute to the noise”. On the other hand, if you will make an effort in keeping the material that you plan to share with him/her ordered, he/she may be able to quickly follow what you are doing and the majority of the time that you will spend together will be actually spent in improving the state of your thesis.

Improve your #mentorship experience: setting up proper #communication #tools with your #thesis's supervisor allow you to optimize the time that you will spend with your #mentor
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Sharing a folder is one of the best communication tools with your thesis supervisor that I was able find. Obviously, the tool itself is not sufficient and how you will structure the material inside plays a crucial role as well. Probably this is not new to you and you may have your own way to do that: maybe using Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint etc. However, you want to check if and how your supervisor currently operating because, as he/she is probably supervising several students at the same time, adopting one system for each student is simply unmanageable. What follows is what I usually recommend to my students. I personally use Dropbox but these recommendations can be easily generalized.

Why did I choose Dropbox? Because is free and I like the idea of having a folder that is the same in every computer that I use. In case you do not have an account this is an invitation link https://db.tt/ALnJBcdQ that will give you 250 MB of free space on top of the 2-5 GB that you will normally have. Nevertheless, let me say again that this is just how I personally operate and is important that you will check with your supervisor how he/she would like to set up the proper communication tools with you!

Communication tools with your thesis supervisor step by step

Step 1: Download and install Dropbox in the computer that you will use for your thesis.

Step 2: Create a shared folder in Dropbox. The title of the folder should have your name and the word “thesis” in it, so that it will not be confusing with potential others.  It like having a normal folder in your computer with the exception that will be shared with your supervisor. In other words every time you will change the files inside the folder your supervisor will see it and you will see the changes that he/she will make as well.

Step 3: Invite your supervisor to the shared folder. Just ask for your supervisor’s Dropbox id and follow the proper procedure.

Step 3:  Create the following structure into the folder.

• Articles: will contains all the scientific articles that you will be reading and you believe are relevant to your thesis.
• Data: if your thesis will be collecting data. This folder will contain information on how the data are structured and the data
• Thesis-Proposal: you probably had to write a thesis proposal to pitch for an internship and/or to validate your preliminary idea. This folder should contains “everything that you have done” before starting the thesis.
• Presentations: relevant PowerPoint presentation.
• Chapter-1: You probably are not going to write your thesis “all in once”. If you will break the thesis in chapters you will have the possibility to finalize once chapter and ask to your supervisor for an early feedback.
• Chapter-2: see chapter 1 comment.
• Chapter-N: yep, as many as you need. I guess the last one should be conclusions
• Appendix: in case you plan to have multiple appendixes consider adding sub-folders into this folder
• Final-Thesis: should contains your “final draft” and your camera ready thesis.

The structure should be as self-explanatory as possible. Obviously, you are welcome to arrange the folder in the way you prefer and to add other sub-folders. Nevertheless, this is the minimum structure that I would like you to consider and always (did I said always? let’s do it again: always) agree with your supervisor on the proper structure. You think that you are sharing folder but in practice you are sharing “mental categories” with him/her.

Final remarks

Setting up the proper communication tools with your thesis supervisor in the end will save you time and will allow a more effective communication. Communication will probably happen via email and/or Skype; nevertheless, you can always point to the shared folder for additional explanation: “I just finished chapter 2, can you please have a look?”. “I found this article in google scholar, is it really relevant?”. “What do you think about visualizing the data in this way?”etc.

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