5. Thesis and Graduation

About

This is the final stage of your MSc study. Here you find guidelines, rules and tips to support your project management. Take some time to read it all before you ask help from (potential) supervisors, professors, the Graduation Coordinator(s), the Programme Coordinator, SPA or secretaries.

Aims of a thesis

An individual thesis project has two main aims: First, you can deep-dive in a (new) topic of your own liking, learn new tools, improve your skills and in most cases, but not necessarily, carry out an internship. Second, we can test if you fulfil the academic end terms regarding

• Research quality: You become master of your graduation topic and contribute to the reduction of one (or more) research gap(s) that you identified in your problem analysis. You write a scientific paper with the highlights of your work;

• Research competences: You initiate, manage and plan your work effectively and efficiently. You meet your supervisors and other experts (on site/online) regularly to discuss your progress. You use these discussions to improve your work; 

• Reporting skills: You produce thesis documents (chapters or sections), which together lead to a final thesis report that meets the requirements as described in the TIL Master Thesis Grading rubric (use it during your project);

• Presentation skills: You are able to present and discuss intermediate project results with your supervisors and present and defend the final results convincingly.

The TIL programme is interdisciplinary, which means that you study your topic from several perspectives. You combine theories, methodologies and tools from earlier master and bachelor courses with data, which will in most cases be obtained via field work as part of a thesis internship.

Information sources

Thesis and graduation manual
General information about the thesis process can be found in our thesis manual.

In this portal
More detailed information can be found here, including tips and tricks and Q&A. This graduation portal precedes the thesis manual by many years, but the content is aligned.

Brightspace
The TIL5060 thesis section contains temporary information such as project calls and announcements.