How Many Of You Felt Like They Had A Mediocre Master S Thesis And

Leo Migdal

-Dec 8, 2025, 6:55 AM

how many of you felt like they had a mediocre master s thesis and

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I am very close to finishing my masters and am finding it extremely difficult to get through with my thesis. Although my topic is relevant and interesting, nobody, including my supervisor is able to guide me well. All my thesis reviews until now have gone really bad because they think I am not doing anything fancy. Writing a master's thesis can be really tough. Many students feel stressed, anxious, or just plain unmotivated. With big deadlines and high expectations, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.

This article will share simple tips to help you get through these challenges and finish your thesis with confidence. Writing a master's thesis is a huge task that can greatly affect your mental health. The process often involves intense periods of stress, anxiety, and a lack of motivation, which can hurt your academic performance and overall quality of life. Understanding these psychological impacts is crucial for developing effective coping strategies. Mastering time management is crucial for successfully completing your master's thesis. Effective time management can mean the difference between a successful academic career and burnout.

Here are some strategies to help you manage your time effectively: Navigating the complexities of thesis writing can be daunting, but leveraging your academic and personal networks can significantly ease the process. Seeking support from academic advisors, mentors, and peers can provide valuable guidance and emotional support. Incorporating mindfulness and meditation into your daily routine can significantly reduce stress levels. These practices help you stay present and focused, which can be particularly beneficial when you're feeling overwhelmed by your thesis. Taking a few minutes each day to meditate can clear your mind and improve your overall well-being.

Feelings of being stuck, of not knowing where we’re going, self-doubt, guilt… are not exclusive to the doctoral thesis journey. Despite their smaller scope, other long projects with little feedback or structure (like a master thesis) share the same motivational pitfalls and may induce the same kind of uncomfortable experience at times. In this two-part post series, we review key advice and simple practices which could also be useful to help us face these capstone projects. But these can also be very useful if you are a PhD student just starting out! (NB: This is a bit of a different kind of post, related to an innovative pedagogy project we are doing with this blog’s long-time friend Paula Odriozola-González, about how we can apply the kind... Please do share it with any bachelor/master students who you think may need it!)

Multiple research studies document how the list of experiences above is very common when doing a doctorate. Our own experience suggests that this also happens quite often to students doing a bachelor or master thesis (or other big capstone projects like the practicum in Education studies). Although these capstone projects are smaller in scope and temporal scale than a doctorate (e.g., a few months vs. 3+ years), they share many characteristics, and pose similar motivational problems to students going through them: they are long, complex projects in which the student has little structure or feedback (compared with the typical... Interestingly enough, this sort of situation is not exclusive to doing a thesis: long projects with little feedback are the day-to-day life of researchers in academia and professionals in many other knowledge work areas. Thus, learning to self-regulate (our learning process, our tasks and time, and our emotions) as we try to tackle these kinds of projects is a hugely valuable skill!

The research literature on doctoral dropouts and our own research trying to help students finish this kind of projects, suggests there’s three critical motivational factors to pay attention to, as we have quite some... How can we influence these three factors? In what sense are they under our control? Put simply: self-regulation skills can be developed through practice. By focusing on practicing simple habits and strategies that foster those three factors, we will become better at executing and completing such long complex projects. While the emotional regulation strategies (factor #3) will be covered in a separate post coming very soon, you can pick below some useful progress (factor #1) and appropriation (factor #2) strategies, whenever you are...

Self-assess which of the three factors above is weaker in your particular situation (score them in a 1-10 scale), choose the lowest area to start with, and pick the problem that feels closer to... NB: all the strategies are useful, but do not try to do them all at the same time, these strategies take time and effort to become habits! Whether you’re at university or college, the last obstacle on your way to graduation is a thesis or equivalent. It’s a piece of work that follows sound scientific practice, where you inevitably have to do a lot of groundwork and write rigorously on the basis of source material. There is no room for personal opinions or narrative. I myself have done two Master’s degrees, both of which involved quite ambitious theses.

In hindsight, I have realized that it could have been easier if I had known a few important things earlier. The teaching and guidance at the university were top-class but focused primarily on the content and research rather than the process behind it. I made many mistakes before I learned to build a systematic and effective way of working. In this article, I’ll go through how to plan your thesis process and time management so that you can work easily and always know what you’re doing next. In addition, your materials will stay organized and your text will gradually get better and better. Whether you’re in the early stages or already at the finishing line, you can make the most of the tips that are most relevant to you.

Note that these cornerstones of a good process are also applicable to any larger project or final project where writing according to the source material and scientific rules is a prerequisite. I am talking specifically about a thesis in the article, but think more broadly in terms of any larger work. In this article, you will find 10 tips to make your work easier. It’s worth focusing on one at a time and moving on to the next once you’ve got the hang of it. Some will be done fairly quickly, but others will take you longer to build up a routine. The text is also quite long, so it might not be a bad idea to chop it up into sections and apply the themes one by one.

Postgraduate programmes, including master’s and doctoral courses worldwide, are notable for nurturing critical thinking, rigorous research skills and intellectual independence. A pivotal part of this journey is the thesis course – a capstone experience where students engage deeply with an original research question, applying the skills they’ve acquired. Yet, ensuring this experience is both enriching and accessible requires continuous dialogue between educators and students. At the School of Economics at the University of Queensland, our online survey and interviews with 20 master’s students led to one simple piece of advice: “Plan ahead! Nothing is too early when it comes to writing a thesis.” Early preparation is essential for a successful thesis journey.

Students should begin by exploring potential supervisors and aligning their research interests as early as possible. Likewise, selecting the right courses early on is crucial for building the skills and knowledge necessary for their thesis. Thesis course coordinators should emphasise this message at the earliest stage. At our school, master’s students can choose to complete a thesis course over one or two semesters after finishing prerequisite courses in statistics and research methods. These students must conduct research and write a thesis on a topic of their choice within their area of interest. As postgraduate coordinator and programme leader of the master’s programme in international economics and finance, Shino Takayama was the thesis course coordinator, while co-author Ransi Jayawardena served as the course administrator.

It quickly became apparent that thesis students often struggled to find a suitable supervisor and identify a topic where they could effectively apply their knowledge. So, we conducted surveys and interviews with these students to confirm that the difficulties we observed indeed aligned with their experiences.

How Many Of You Felt Like They Had A Mediocre Master S Thesis And

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