Objectives.
Description. The micro thesis will be a miniature of or skeleton for your dissertation. It will have the same structure, but shorter, and, by necessity, missing some sections. It will have five parts, each worth 10% of your final mark. You may hand in the parts in any order, at any point during the term. However, all parts must be handed in by the last day of instruction for the quarter (March 19).
The five parts of the micro thesis are:
Background. Advice on starting and
finishing a thesis from various members of the software engineering community
are discussed course as part of this course. These are:
Many other resources like these are available on the web. Furthermore, there
are books available on writing a dissertation in Langson Library.Your advisor
likely has some dissertations that you can look at. Ask to see one that she
or he thinks is well done and one that is not.
Another approach to understanding the structure of a thesis is to look at a PhD thesis from another discipline, one that is completely foreign to you. You won't be distracted by the content and will be able to better focus on the structure, chapters, and organization.
Deliverables. The total size of the Micro Thesis is comparable in size to other term projects. (For example, it should be a bit larger than the survey paper for ICS221 FQ03. approximately 30 pages, double spaced.) Do not be deceived by the length expectation; it is harder to write something concise than to ramble. Here are some comments on the five sections of the Micro Thesis.
Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion. Recall the adage about essay writing: Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them. The same goes for thesis writing, only several times over as the thesis itself, the chapters, and other sub-parts need to follow this fractal-like structure.
Often the only part of your thesis that will be read by any sizable audience is the Abstract. This is the teaser or trailer that gives a capsule summary the entire document. The class on February 10 will include a discussion on how to write abstracts. In addition, Assignment 3 will be on writing abstracts. The introduction is the first presentation of the key ideas in the thesis and should include some background and some motivation. The conclusion recapitulates and critizes the thesis with an eye towards the future. The conclusion is also the last step in a journey and it's your last chance to talk about what you've learned.
Although the Abstract and Introduction appear first in the thesis, they are often written last along with the Conclusion.
Literature Review. In the literature review, you need to analyze and synthesize work that is relevant to your thesis. It is not an enumeration of every piece of work that is vaguely related. You need to describe the field prior to your work, in preparation for showing that your work is a contribution or improvement on what existed before. You need to show that the field is substantial enough for you to do a PhD. The length of your literature review will depend on your field. Some areas have only one or two seminal works. In contrast, an interdisciplinary thesis will need to review much more material.
Problem Statement. In this section, you state the research question that you address in the thesis and why it is a worthy problem, i.e. solving it would a contribution to the community. Depending on the thesis, the Problem Statement might appear before the Literature Review.
Plan of Work. Here, you identify the sub-problems or steps that you will take in your research to solve the problem that was stated in the previous section/chapter. In a Thesis Proposal or Research Proposal, the goal would be to show that you know how you will get to the end or answer. In that context, it would be appropriate to include estimates of how long each of the steps will take.
Validation Plan. After stating your solution, you need to show that it indeed solves the problem that you initially stated. Your plan needs to describe what you would do to validate your hypothetical results. For example, if you were to use an experiment, you would describe the design of the experiment, subjects, indepdendent and dependent variables, and data analysis. The approach that you take will depend on the problem, your result, and the intellectual tradition that you are following. Your Validation Plan must explicitly state whether you are following a mathematical, scientific, engineering, or some other model for research.