How to successfully write
your Bachelor/Master
thesis.
Most universities value your thesis more than any other course. Your thesis is THE defining work that
will make or break your academic life. But it is hard. You have never done anything like this before
and you have no clue how to get started. I know what that feels like cause I too struggled to finish
my thesis, but luckily for you, you don’t have to struggle. I have made this document as cheap as
possible so that as many people as possible can benefit from it. I struggled so much whilst doing my
thesis and I hope all will be spared from that.
A smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
In this short document I will talk you through the entire process step by step and give you all the
information you need to successfully write your thesis. I will do this by first telling you what subject
to pick, and then I’ll be going over all the relevant parts in the thesis.
1. Picking the subject
The first and perhaps the most important step in writing a thesis is picking the subject. This is
coincidentally also the step that goes wrong most often. In the third year of my bachelor’s I made
the terrible mistake to come up with my own thesis subject, and that didn’t go too well…
Many of you will get a list of possible topics to choose from and then you’ll have to find your own
research question. Based on your pick you will assigned a thesis supervisor who will help you refine
your research question. There is however one issue with this; you have no clue what to research and
how to do research!
So what now? Easy, you open up google scholar and type in the name of your subject. Let’s take
“investment banking” as an example.
, As soon as you hit enter you will find hundreds of articles all relevant to investment banking, quite
handy on it’s own, but articles from 1986 won’t help you a lot, since most thesis supervisors consider
these outdated. So now you’ll have to go to the left of your screen and select the period in which the
articles have been published. For now I’ll select 2018 (this was written in 2022).
Now that we have refined the list to current articles we see this first paper about “Investment
banking in America”. Such an article seems to be splendid for the next part of the process, cause
now that you have found a list of useful articles you will have to look into these articles and see if
you can use them as your Base Paper.
What is a Base Paper? This will be the paper you will base your entire research around, preferably by
redoing their research but by just adjusting one variable. If we revert back to the example we saw an
article about “investment banking in America”. Well, you could change the “in America” part to
become “in Europe”, and poof, you got yourself a valid thesis subject.
You can do this with basically any paper as long as you’re smart about it. Choosing such a base paper
will be useful since it will allow you to recycle their citations, conceptual model, and methodology
section.
your Bachelor/Master
thesis.
Most universities value your thesis more than any other course. Your thesis is THE defining work that
will make or break your academic life. But it is hard. You have never done anything like this before
and you have no clue how to get started. I know what that feels like cause I too struggled to finish
my thesis, but luckily for you, you don’t have to struggle. I have made this document as cheap as
possible so that as many people as possible can benefit from it. I struggled so much whilst doing my
thesis and I hope all will be spared from that.
A smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
In this short document I will talk you through the entire process step by step and give you all the
information you need to successfully write your thesis. I will do this by first telling you what subject
to pick, and then I’ll be going over all the relevant parts in the thesis.
1. Picking the subject
The first and perhaps the most important step in writing a thesis is picking the subject. This is
coincidentally also the step that goes wrong most often. In the third year of my bachelor’s I made
the terrible mistake to come up with my own thesis subject, and that didn’t go too well…
Many of you will get a list of possible topics to choose from and then you’ll have to find your own
research question. Based on your pick you will assigned a thesis supervisor who will help you refine
your research question. There is however one issue with this; you have no clue what to research and
how to do research!
So what now? Easy, you open up google scholar and type in the name of your subject. Let’s take
“investment banking” as an example.
, As soon as you hit enter you will find hundreds of articles all relevant to investment banking, quite
handy on it’s own, but articles from 1986 won’t help you a lot, since most thesis supervisors consider
these outdated. So now you’ll have to go to the left of your screen and select the period in which the
articles have been published. For now I’ll select 2018 (this was written in 2022).
Now that we have refined the list to current articles we see this first paper about “Investment
banking in America”. Such an article seems to be splendid for the next part of the process, cause
now that you have found a list of useful articles you will have to look into these articles and see if
you can use them as your Base Paper.
What is a Base Paper? This will be the paper you will base your entire research around, preferably by
redoing their research but by just adjusting one variable. If we revert back to the example we saw an
article about “investment banking in America”. Well, you could change the “in America” part to
become “in Europe”, and poof, you got yourself a valid thesis subject.
You can do this with basically any paper as long as you’re smart about it. Choosing such a base paper
will be useful since it will allow you to recycle their citations, conceptual model, and methodology
section.
