How to write a graduation thesis for international students?

It's been a while since I graduated, and I want to share my experience in writing a thesis.

Select a title.

Speaking of topic selection, I made a big mistake. I will overturn and rewrite all the proposals three or four days before submitting the proposal (also blame me for making a one-on-one appointment with my tutor a little late).

At that time, my tutor pointed out that my problem was that the topic was not specific enough and too broad. This should also be the problem that most people encounter when choosing a topic.

So what is the specific topic?

If the graduation thesis has no designated research scope, you'd better choose the direction you are interested in.

After all, it takes a month to write a graduation thesis. With a lot of literature reading and data collection and processing, believe me, this is really a boring and maddening process. Let interest be your first motivation.

When you decide on a broad direction, limit your topic step by step with divergent thinking.

For example, the direction I choose is the service industry. The service industry covers a wide range, such as hotel services, catering services, education services, environmental services, financial services and so on.

According to my interest and major, I further define the scope of the topic as catering. And catering is divided into traditional catering and online catering. There are many academic reports about traditional catering, which is not conducive to innovation, so I focused on online catering.

Online catering is divided, and there will be factors such as O2O e-commerce model and take-away platform. The takeaway platform itself will involve the platform itself, transportation and consumers. By analogy, the topic of the paper will see the model bit by bit.

I won't go into details about other value issues here, just remember not to choose controversial, technically difficult and fried papers.

abstract

This part is short, but important. It is equivalent to a high summary of the whole paper. It can be summarized in five sentences:

1. Why do you want to do this research? What are the shortcomings or defects of this research?

2. What method is used to do this research?

3. What kind of data are used to verify your method?

4. The conclusion of this study.

5. What is the significance of the conclusion to the research field and events (practical and theoretical significance).

Many people will choose to do this part after writing their papers (in fact, I did the same). However, you can conceive the content of the paper according to the structure at the beginning of the paper.

foreword

Research background: In addition to your background, it is more important to explain your motivation and why you want to do this research. For example, the problem is the current development trend, or the problem is imminent and needs to be solved.

Research significance: research significance can be divided into theoretical significance (such as the discovery of a new theory fills the gap in this study) and practical significance (which can bring certain benefits to a certain aspect of society).

Research Status: Here is a brief literature review. It mainly explains what the predecessors have done in the research field, what problems have been solved, what problems have not been solved, and what problems have not been solved, which are the problems to be solved in this study. Avoid repeating previous research results in your own papers.

Research question: The blank of the research is clarified above, and then you can logically transition to the question you want to study.

Purpose and objectivity: Many people don't know the difference between white purpose and objectivity when writing papers. Aim is a big directional goal, such as analyzing or exploring the influence of too many choices on consumer satisfaction, which can be directly used as the topic of the paper. Goals are concrete steps to achieve their goals. In order to analyze the influence of excessive choice on consumer satisfaction, I need to understand the relationship between excessive choice and consumer satisfaction in the first step, collect data and evaluate consumer satisfaction in the second step, analyze the data I got in the third step and compare it with the previous conclusions, in the fourth and fifth steps. . . And so on.

Theoretical framework: briefly introduce the theoretical model to be used in your research and how to use it.

Context boundary: I haven't mentioned this part in many articles. I didn't particularly understand it when I wrote it before. Because my thesis chooses an app as a case, the tutor's suggestion is to introduce the market and development of the selected app. This is just for reference. If you don't understand, please consult your tutor.

Demarcation: The main purpose is to reduce the uncertainty of the paper, so we should delimit the scope of investigation. Just explain how you narrowed the investigation down to what you described.

Structure of the article: It is not difficult to summarize how to write the next four parts.

Literature review

Literature review is a big project, but its difficulty lies not in writing, but in a lot of reading and sorting.

So how to organize a large number of documents efficiently?

Time: it is to sort out the documents in the chronological order of publication. What previous studies have been done, what conclusions have been drawn in the medium term, and what is the recent trend. If you take the time to sort it out, you should pay more attention to the unsolved problems in the recent literature when summing up.

Conclusion: This is my method. Here you can divide your conclusions into positive, negative and neutral. Of course, here is mainly classified according to the direction of your paper.

The writing of literature review is not just copying the conclusions drawn by predecessors, you need to understand and summarize their conclusions, and then express them in your own words, so the similarity will be greatly reduced.

The citation of documents varies from school to school, as long as it meets the requirements of the school.

Methodology

This is probably the hardest part of studying abroad. Anyway, it took me a lot of time to figure it out.

This part mainly wants to know what method you used in your graduation thesis and why you used this method.

Foreign methodology has a certain format, but in the final analysis, it is what is in the onion circle above.

(I won't talk about the specific content of onion rings here. )

Philosophy: First of all, explain the philosophy I chose, why I should use it, and what are its advantages and disadvantages. Because different philosophies will involve different methods of data collection and analysis, we should choose according to the specific situation of our thesis. For example, quantitative research is usually related to positivism, and qualitative research is usually related to explanatory philosophy.

Methods: This paper mainly explains the method you chose and the place reflected in the paper. You can choose one or both. Deduction is mainly the process of deducing facts from knowledge, that is, what knowledge you have compiled in your paper, and then ask questions and assumptions, and then verify whether this assumption is correct through data. Induction is the process of deducing knowledge from facts, that is, the process of deducing half hypotheses from conclusions.

Research methods: explain whether your thesis mainly adopts quantitative analysis or qualitative analysis, why you use this method to obtain data, and where these data are reflected.

Research strategy: strategy is an action plan to achieve the goal. A research strategy can be defined as a plan for researchers to answer their research questions. In layman's terms, it is what strategy I used, how to use this strategy, and what benefits it has.

Time span: It is related to the period of your thesis. Short-term is a horizontal survey of a specific object at a specific time. Have enough time to study the changes and development vertically.

The coat of onion rings is peeled off layer by layer, and the innermost data collection actually tells you how you collect qualitative and quantitative data. How to design a questionnaire survey, how to establish contact with the respondents, and what ways to obtain information can be written.

Under normal circumstances, British papers also have some moral considerations, such as participants' right to know and privacy, cheating between the two parties, data protection, environmental protection, animal protection and so on. , this part can be written.

This part of the methodology will also talk about population sampling, mainly introducing the city or country you choose, and the economic situation and population situation can be briefly introduced. The most important part is how you choose the sample and the basis for choosing the sample size.

Data analysis includes two aspects. First, how did you get these data, but how did you preliminarily process the data you collected?

Discovery, analysis and discussion

The discovery and analysis part is to show the data you collected, and you can use various charts reasonably. For example, if you do a questionnaire survey and interview on your paper, you should summarize and describe the results of the questionnaire survey respectively. The summary part does not need to summarize all the data, just select several important groups of data.

The discussion part is to compare your results with the results of existing literature to see if the conclusions are consistent. If not, what are the reasons? It can be discussed from many angles.

conclusion and suggestion

This part is a high-level summary of your conclusion. In addition, you should also explain where you think the limitations of your article are, for example, because some objective factors may lead to biased results or ignore which factors have not been considered. Finally, we can talk about the future research direction. Most importantly, this part should not have any new ideas that have not been mentioned before.

At this point, the text ends, and finally I add a few small details that I think are very important.

Reasonable time arrangement

It is really important to arrange your time reasonably to write your graduation thesis. Never regard the deadline as the primary productive force.

Suggestion 15% of the time is spent on topic selection, 20% on methodology formulation, 25% on reading and 40% on writing.

Meet the tutor.

Mentors are really the best resource. Be sure to see your tutor more often and ask more questions. Although it is your first time to write a thesis, your tutor is an old hand.

Tutors have no obligation and responsibility to ensure that students' papers pass, so don't pin all your hopes on tutors. According to the feedback and suggestions given by the tutor, it is enough to modify the paper appropriately.

I wrote my thesis for half a year and went back to review it. It took me three nights to write it. I hope everyone will not be stingy with their approval.

I wish you all a successful graduation thesis.