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How To Write a Master's Thesis

NLP Master's Thesis from Enrollment to Defense

This tutorial could also be called things I wish I had known when I was writing my diploma thesis. This guideline is intended to ease writing your master's thesis (and hopefully, to produce better theses and successful defenses, as a result) and what better way is there than provide you with a spectrum of information I gained being on both sides of the trench. I'm going to navigate you through the process of your master's thesis assignment, writing and defense. The guideline is mostly fitted to a typical experimental NLP master's thesis but I'm sure you can tweak it to other situation once you get the general idea.

Enrollment

Timeline

Below is an expected timeline for your thesis development. I don't think I can stress this enough: start EARLY. Seriously. You will make your life much easier if you start programming, measuring and writing (that especially!) in good time. Most opponents can recognize hasty writing hurriedly finished over the last week before deadline. As for the question what is the minimum time in which I can write a thesis, let's pretend I never heard that.

The timelines of everything that happens at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, such as beginnings and ends of semesters, deadlines for courses and exams enrollments, deadlines for theses submissions and theses exams, is strictly bound by an official https://www.mff.cuni.cz/en/students/academic-calendar/ Academic Calendar of the faculty. Look for the exact deadlines of the required actions in the current academic year issue of the calendar.

With that in mind, let's say that a typical master's curriculum takes two academic years (four semesters). Master's thesis writing is officially a three-semester course, consisting of three subsequent (!) semesters each of which you must subscribe to in the https://is.mff.cuni.cz/ study information system (SIS) with the help of your supervisor, in the appointed deadline.

That generates roughly the following course of action:

When planning, allow sufficient time for (at the very least) one, but preferably two corrections from your supervisor. Ideally, you'll write the thesis and send it to your supervisor, allowing several days (or smaller number of weeks if they are very busy) for reading. Unless you are already experienced academic writer, at least one reading is critical for the thesis to pass because your supervisor will spot the obvious problems and tell you what to fix. Don't despair if there are many (many, many) comments, that's absolutely normal. Just keep calm and deal with them one by one.

Working on Thesis

Writing the Thesis

- Typical number of pages
- Chapters (Introduction, Related Work, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Appendices)
- Referencing
- Tables, Figures, Graphs

Submitting the Thesis

Don't fall in the PDF/A trap! The electronic system requires all submitted PDF in PDF/A format and there is an automatic check for PDF/A. Allow yourself enough time to find out how to convert your PDF into PDF/A (like, not in the last two hours before deadline midnight).


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