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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 exact dates 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 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 study information system (SIS), in the appointed deadline.

That generates roughly the following course of action:

Funnily enough, there is even an official deadline for Recommended period for deciding master's thesis topics in the oh-so-important Academic Calendar. As of 2022, it was Feb 11, just three days before the official start of the summer semester. It is only recommended, though, but gives the idea about the expected timing.

Each of them is offered separately in the study information system (SIS), each of them must be enrolled in the required deadline and they can be taken separately in three possible terms throughout the year: summer (June), autumn (September) and winter (February). Please note that the deadline for registration differs for each of the terms. For successful students, when everything went well, the summer final examination after the 2nd year's summer semester is the preferred time of taking the examination.

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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