WRITING A THESIS
Karen M. Olsen
Agenda
• Finding a topic
• Requirements of a master thesis
- Be prepared – take Methodology for master thesis STR402/405!
• What to put on the application for supervisor
Finding a topic
• Look in textbooks, DN, the Economist, Financial
Times, etc
• Look for on-going research projects, f. ex.
- FOCUS – Future-Oriented Corporate Solutions (STR, INB, FIE)
and Beyond Budgeting (BUS)
- CSI – Center for Service Innovation (MBM, STR)
- S T O P (STR, BUS, and FIN)
Requirements of a master thesis
• A larger unified piece of work
• 30 ECTS credits (workload 1 semester)
• Ca. 50-80 pages
• You have to write in groups of 2 students
http://www.nhh.no/en/student-pages/thesis/guidelines-related-totheses-in-the-msc-programme.aspx
How to write a master thesis?
STR402/405
• Basic methodological preparations
- What does a master thesis look like?
- What are the requirements to conduct a scientific piece of work?
- What is methods?
- What does a methods chapter in your thesis contain?
• How will you learn about this?
- Read about methods and analyze examples
- Practical experience through exercises
- Develop a project description
Mainly students in STR and MBM, but also INB,
ENE, BUS, SAM
The process of writing the thesis
Research question
Theory
Model
Design
Data collection
Data analysis
Reporting
Collect your own or use existing
data?
• Collect own data
- Experiments, surveys, qualitative interviews, observation,
etc
- Notification of master thesis projects to NSD:
http://www.nsd.uib.no/personvern/om/english.html
• Use existing data - possible sources
- Official registers (SSB, stock exchange, Brønnøysund, etc)
- Surveys collected by a firm; ex. employees or customers
- Data collected in research projects
- Norwegian Social Science Data Service www.nsd.no
What to put on the application for
supervisor
• Try to explain as accurately as possible what you
intend to do
• Your choice of words will decide which supervisors are
relevant
• Talk to potential supervisors
• Topic is not ‘cut in stone’