The first semester of my master’s dissertation
Now that the dust has settled for the first year of my E-Business master’s degree, I can finally look back at these two semesters and share my experience, particularly for what I’ve written for the dissertation so far.
Along with the “normal” classes the first year of a master’s is known for, we have also written and presented our dissertation/project/internship proposal to the degree’s scientific committee. In other words, we can spend the next two semesters working on our dissertations instead of doing it only in the last semester as usual (I will refer to the dissertation/project/internship option as dissertation because that’s what I’m working on). For the effect, we had a dedicated class which taught us scientific methodologies and supported our proposal development with milestones.
The first milestone in this semester-long journey was choosing between writing a dissertation, a project or an internship, and choosing the theme and the supervisors/teachers to work with. For me it was fairly easy, as I had a general idea of the theme I wanted and knew who I wanted to work with. And it’s worth pointing out the lecturer and the degree’s director were there to support other classmates in finding supervisors.
The next step was writing a literature review scientific article, which was delivered at around the halfway point of the semester. It had a six-page limit and, as expected, the intention is to use it as the starting point of the dissertation’s literature review.
This article was then uploaded to a scientific platform (though it was kept in the context of the class) and we had to peer-review each other’s work. The supervisors also participated in the review process and, for me, “it went pretty bad”. It was not that the article I had written was completely bad, but I had gone off-topic and lost focus (at the time my theme was Student Modeling, that is, to automatically create profiles/personas for e-learning students).
However, I’m thankful that I got to change themes. After that review, I changed my theme to Educational Process Mining, that is, to discover learning processes for e-learners with Process Mining techniques, and since then I have been much more focused on what to do. Naturally, I had to start pretty much from scratch but the second literature review article was way better in my honest opinion.
Afterwards, the last month of the semester for this class (please do not forget we had other four classes) was dedicated to writing the formal dissertation proposal. By this time, I had a much better idea of what to do and the supervisors nudged me in the right direction, namely by calling me out when I was trying to add too much to the proposal. Additionally, one of my supervisors recommended me a Process Mining online course which taught me most of what I now know about the topic. It truly helped me in planning what to do in the dissertation and writing it down for the proposal.
Regarding the contents of the proposal, it was fairly simple. It included:
- Introduction;
- The literature review written previously;
- A chapter to explain what will be done during the dissertation (“what?”);
- A chapter to explain how the results will be achieved (“how?”);
- A chapter with the organization of the study: schedule of activities, ethical questions faced, and a first draft of the contents for the final document (simply a table of contents for the finalized dissertation).
Lastly, after submitting the proposal, I had to present it to the degree’s scientific committee. In reality, it was a normal 10-minute presentation to the degree’s director, the lecturer of the class, and the supervisors. It wasn’t a nerve-racking presentation that could make or break the dissertation, rather, I think of it as a check point where I gathered feedback from knowledgeable people to improve my proposal and make better work next year. The only “downside” was that we had to do it online due to the COVID-19 situation. By the way, we didn’t have to submit a revised proposal because, well, the revisions are to be put in practice during the dissertation’s development.
Finally, to summarize the first semester of writing my master’s dissertation, this semester was for writing the proposal and I went through the following steps:
- Choosing a theme and supervisors;
- Writing a literature review scientific article;
- Submitting the article to be peer-review by the supervisors and classmates;
- Improving the article based on feedback;
- Writing the dissertation proposal; and
- Presenting the proposal.
Overall, I’m happy with the proposal I arrived at and everything I did to get here. Changing themes to start from scratch was hard, even disheartening, but it was worth it. I am proud of the work I’ve done and I’m looking forward to what is to come.
If you’re interested in learning more about the E-Business master’s degree I’m enrolled in, you can find more about it here (note: it is an in-person degree from Porto Accounting and Business School, a college in Porto, Portugal).
