Topic and Supervisor

If you are interested in writing your final thesis at the Junior Professorship for Digital Transformation and Society, you have three options to find a topic:

• Look at the thesis topics website to see if the professorship team currently offers specific topics and contact the supervisor of the topic.
• Inspect the research areas at the professorship listed below and contact the supervisor of a research area you are interested in. You may ask for a topic and/or develop your own ideas.
• Bring your own topic and contact a supervisor you think may be suitable for this idea.

Please note: Supervisors have limited capacities and may not be available at the time you want to write your thesis. It is on the supervisors to decide whether they think a topic is feasible and sufficiently interesting (to them) for a final thesis.

If a supervisor is available and willing to supervise your topic, please arrange an initial meeting to align the understanding of the topic and the expectations.

Proposal

Following the initial meeting with the potential supervisor, you must write a proposal. The proposal helps your supervisor understand your research idea and assess the feasibility of its implementation in a final thesis. For a bachelor’s thesis, the language of the proposal and the thesis can be selected in accordance with the supervisor. A master’s thesis (proposal) must be written in English. The proposal should have the following structure:

Hook:

1. What is the topic area and why is it important?
2. What is the general problem or situation in this topic area?

Research gap:

3. What are the conclusions of the existing literature for the problem/situation in this topic area?
4. What issues or limitations does the existing literature have?

Role of your work and description of your approach:

5. How does your study address this problem? What explicit research question do you want to answer?
6. What research design does the study follow (method, data collection, data analysis) to address the problem?

Brief preview of the expected results:

7. What are the expected findings?
8. How do these findings contribute to and extend existing knowledge?

You should write a couple of sentences per question so that you have a total of about one and a half (bachelor’s thesis) to two pages (master’s thesis) of text. You do not need to include the questions above themselves in the proposal; they only serve to structure your research idea. In addition, you should attach a structure of your thesis (in form of a table of contents) and a time schedule (preferably as a Gantt chart) for the thesis on a separate page each. Furthermore, it is important to list your literature sources in a bibliography – but only those that you use in your proposal.

Please send a draft of your proposal to your potential supervisor. Supervisors may demand changes or improvements if they think the research idea is not explained clearly enough to commence work on the thesis. Potential supervisors may decline the supervision if you do not come up with a sufficiently elaborated proposal.

Thesis registration

Once the supervisor approves the proposal, you may complete the thesis registration form and the supervisor can start the thesis registration process. At the end of this process, you can “collect your topic” from the secretary of the professorship and the writing period beings. The start of the writing period can be any date you and the supervisor agree on in the registration form.

Writing the thesis

The length of the writing period is specified in the examination rules. You can use this tool to calculate the deadline of your thesis. Please use the templates provided by the professorship to format your thesis document and follow all guidelines laid out in the templates when formatting your thesis.

You can schedule meetings with your supervisor during the writing period to record and discuss your progress. The supervisor will also help you with any questions you may have while writing your thesis. Please value your supervisor’s time by gathering questions before approaching your supervisor and proposing solutions instead of demanding them from your supervisor.

At the end of the writing period, you must upload your thesis to the thesis uploader. For information on how to use the thesis uploader, please look here. Please do not forget to sign the declarations at the end of your thesis.

Note of caution

Writing a final thesis takes a lot of time. Please keep this in mind when planning your term. Attending too many courses and seminars, conducting an internship, or working in a regular job while writing the final thesis is extremely demanding and, in most cases, highly detrimental to the quality of the thesis.

Thesis Template

Please use the following template for your thesis: DTS Word Template