Thesis Writing Guidance

Thesis Writing Guidance

Thesis Writing Guidance

We ask you to register your thesis proposal in the Student Information System (SIS) twelve months before your expected defense. You are welcome to modify or even completely change the topic of your thesis if you encounter obstacles implementing your original plan.

The first step will be to identify a topic of your interest and formulate your research question. Finding a good research question may be challenging, but it is rather important. When looking for the right research question, I suggest you consider topics covered in courses that you liked and in which you performed well. When you find a suitable topic, prepare your thesis proposal following the steps I recommend below. Send your draft proposal to your preferred supervisor. Ask the professor for feedback and indicate your interest in having him/her as your supervisor. The better your performance in the professor’s course(s) and the better your proposal, the more likely the professor is to agree to supervise you. 

In your research proposal, you should identify your research question, motivate the original contribution of the intended study to prior research literature, specify and motivate several empirically testable hypotheses, and provide a preliminary indication of the methodology you intend to use to test your hypotheses. Try to make sure that you will be able to perform empirical tests that give some degree of confidence about the direction of causality between the studied variables and to actually get access to the data needed to run your tests. 

You can find some helpful tools in the online folder below. I suggest you start by reading the guidebook “How to Write a Thesis Proposal”. It offers recommendations and tips that you may find useful. You may also check the handouts from a lecture “Challenges of Empirical Research”, which discusses the way of addressing endogeneity in the studied relationship, i.e., the direction of causality. The folder also contains additional tools, e.g., a Zotero citation style, a map of literature, and a document template that you can use for your thesis. I hope you will find these files helpful.

For inspiration on suitable topics, I suggest you browse through the abstracts and introductions of theses defended in the past. You may wish to start with the ones that won prizes. See the hyperlinks below.