Thesis Writing

[Declan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJdDP5ISn80 Good video giving you the ingredients that should be in a dissertation. Although this is as good as far as it goes, the first thing to get into your noggin is that you must write down on paper at the earliest opportunity, precisely what you are going to examine in your dissertation, and what academic sources, orthodox methodology and data you are going to use. For almost all dissertations, orthodoxy is best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyuHRFt14U0 Watch this clip from the movie, The Departed, with all its top gun actors and directors. Yet there are two bloopers in this clip. Now, if they cannot get it perfect, how much more careful must you be in doing your thesis. Don't make it easy to fail you.
http://www.moviemistakes.com have a lot more of these. Check out the amount of mistakes in Titanic, the boo hoo movie with Leonardo de Caprio. If their movies are so "bad", how much careful have you to be The point here is this: if you make it too easy on your examiners to be hard on you, then you cannot expect to do well. If you make no effort in getting good sources, good methodology etc and if you do not even bother with a rudimentary spell check, do not expect to do well. The movies cites above had huge budgets and great care was put into them. Yet, they still made very avoidable mistakes. You should try to be more careful.

[Declan]

Here is what Soton's Writing Skills centre say (also can be had in Word format): http://tinyurl.com/yd4xs3u. Note: I got this by doing a google search. There are countless other advice pieces on Google. That being so, here is my take, from experience:

Put it in writing on paper from the start:
You need this at the start: http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/Dissertation_hayes.doc
Here are the steps (but we must later work through them. http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/thesis_steps.doc
Study tactics: http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/SC_-_Study_Tactics.pdf
Thesis planning in Powerpoint http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/thesis.ppt
Thesis steps in jpeg http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/thesis_plan.jpg
As the dissertation process continues, I get reams of un numbered pages (evidence that the student did not bother to proof read a printed version), rambling discourses on the $, on the credit crunch or on some other very broad topic. You cannot do a dissertation on a borad topic for the simple but obviously not obvious reason that it is too broad. You are supposed to be adding value and that is normally done in small steps on a small and localised topic. These screeds on the $ or whatever often lack academic sources (if you cannot cite recent academic articles, then you are failing to show that you are building on the evidence/facts generally already agreed upon).
So, first off, you should trawl through Google Scholar or some other appropriate search engine/source and identify the topic you intend to research. To begin, make the topic broad: mergers & acquisitions, value at risk, etc etc. Then collect appropriate academic articles and data and ensure you can do the methodology the published articles used. If you have academic articles, relevant data and if you can do the methodology, then you are in a good position. Your finished article will be a replication of those earlier articles and, though probably not earth shattering, will be in the ball park; it will, in other words, have a similar standard to the published work.
Often, students begin a dissertation and, much later, they find they cannot collect the relevant data. By beginning all those processes at the earliest opportunity, you avoid having those problems later on when, they stand a much higher chance of mucking up your timetable.

Notes on how to do term papers http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/QS_-_Essays_and_Term_Papers.pdf
A good and well structured undergraduate dissertation on mergers http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/Dissertation_mergers.doc
A good and well structured undergraduate dissertation on ethical investing http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/ethical.doc
Undergraduate dissertation on British charities http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/charities.doc
Undergraduate dissertation on hedging in the airline industry http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/ugrad_airline_hedging_DISSERTATION.doc
A well structured post graduate dissertation on value at risk submitted at Worcester. This showed up in a Turnitin plagiarism report http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/Rajesh_Thesis.pdf
A Cranbourne MBA thesis on Islamic banking. http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/Cranbourne_Islamic_Banking.pdf
Dissertation assessment grid http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/DissertationAssessmentGrid.pdf
Islamic banking thesis in Word format. Don't Turnitin it. http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/Islamic_Banks%20-Performance%20Measures.doc
Accounting standards: http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/acctng_standards_regs.doc
HRM focused survey: http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/acctng_standards_regs.doc


Short piece on what should be in qualitative work: http://www.sotonsom.com/theses/hrm_survey_ug.rtf

All of the above give you a template to work with. It is up to you to roll up your sleeves, to do the work and to commit to paper. These things are no good in your head. Begin writing down in a structured manner at the earliest.

[Declan]

1. Students come for a chat. Because they have not read the above and have not done the suggested one page outline, this chat is directionless, is a massive waste of time and is therefore very frustrating. And forst impressions, when bad, do count.
2. Allied to the above, students chat in a "know it all" way, suggsting they have things under control. This is usually a sign that they are trying to do what they regard as the bare minimum. They intend to use a template on, say, mergers, and replicate it, monkey-like. They cannot see that aiming low is a high risk strategy as they might well end beneath their target and fail. Also, because a dissertation is supposed to be adding value, one should logically be aiming high, building on the shoulders of giants and all that. Laziness is perennial and knows no borders.
3. Rambling discourses on the American dollar or what not. These efforts resemble/replicate low value added blogs. They show the student ranting off about some topic they plucked from the paper/website and thinking that a load of words and disjointed ideas make a thesis. They do not. The building blocks have been spelt out before: relevant and recent academic articles, relevant theory, relevant and recent data, ball park methodology to test the proposed hypothesis to posit and then "prove" the thesis.
4. Rambling discourses emailed to me on un numbered pages. This shows the student has not even bothered to spell check their work. Surprisingly, perhaps, this often applies to students whose (non native) English is very poor.
5. Some mish mash ideas, often taken from banking type subjects, stating (often vaguely) something or other as fact and then ranting on about them. The core ingredients, explained above, are misssing.
6. Spelling the names of faculty members wrongly. This comon practice is not from the Dale Carnegie playbook.
7. Surveys don't usually go down well in Finance. They are a bad idea in Finance. There is no literature to speak of and devising and evaluating them is tricky in the extreme.

Bottom line:
1. find at least one recent and relevant academic article you can replicate. This can be on mergers, mutual funds' returns or from any orthodox area in finance.
2. get data that allows you to replicate what they did.
3. get and be able to do methodologies to replicate what they did with the data you collected.