Writing an essay for master students

Note

Aim: provide initial guidelines on writing the essay for master students at Department for Informatics, UiO

Level: beginner 🌱

This page is based on a presentation given by Torbjørn Rognes on April 26, 2022.

Formalities

  • The essay should be 10-15 pages long.

  • The deadline is June 1.

  • The students should agree on contents with the supervisors.

  • The essay must be found acceptable by the supervisors.

  • It is recommended to write in English, but Norwegian is also possible (only if writing in English is very hard).

Note that this is not an essay in a classical sense. The text might also be used later for the actual master thesis.

Why write an essay?

The essay can help to come to an understanding between supervisors and the student. It can help determine the goals of the project in more detail and understand the topic of the project. It will also require to read the relevant literature, and identify the data and tools to use to solve the problem. The essay should also include a plan of what to do, in which order, and when to do it. It is also helpful to learn academic writing and to properly cite and reference the literature. By writing an essay, one will also start learning to make simple figures and tables.

Programming and experiments for the thesis then come after the essay is written and the plan is made.

What should the essay include?

The essay should include the following:

  • The front page with the title, author, etc. Choose a title that is broadly understandable, but still specific enough. Avoid abbreviations in the title.

  • A table of contents,

  • Introduction (which could be relatively short),

  • Goals (clarifying briefly what the goals of the master thesis are),

  • Background (a bit more in depth overview of the relevant field),

  • Methods & Materials with description of tools and datasets that are planned to be used in the thesis,

  • Plan (overview of the steps towards the thesis, maybe a Gantt chart might be useful to illustrate that),

  • Literature references (the advice is to use some reference manager, e.g., Zotero).

How to approach writing?

It is good to start with a template or a good example and create the structure of the document. Then one could add chapter headlines (e.g., Introduction, Goals). To make it easy to read and reference later, use numbered sections and subsections. It is often useful to add notes for yourself in the text and fill in the text gradually (it doesn’t have to be sequential). The best practice is to also use a system for citing literature and references.

Feedback from the supervisors

To get the most out of the supervisors’ feedback, submit the draft versions regularly, perhaps a few days before each meeting. There is no need to wait until everything is perfect before submitting, one could easily be off track and it is better to get the feedback sooner. Typically, the supervisors will need a few days to provide feedback. To make it easy to get feedback, it is a good idea to indicate what changed since the last draft and to use format where it is easy to comment. The best option is to have a Google Doc, but it is also possible to share the draft in Word or PDF. If you are writing in latex, convert it to PDF before sending for feedback so that is easy to add comments. It is also nice to include page numbers.