Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be speaking about what we went through during this week’s lecture, mainly focusing on developing a research topic and the key steps we need to consider for the upcoming 10 weeks before we submit our thesis proposal. I’ll then be speaking about what I planned to do after this lecture, in preparation for next week’s lecture.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we looked at developing a research topic. At the start of the lecture, our lecturer went over the importance of making a start now on our research, rather than starting during the summer or in term 4. He advised us to do it bit by bit as we will be too overwhelmed in term 4 if we are still focusing on the literature review, as we will be focusing on other sections of the thesis by then, as well as creating the animation itself. He recommended we dedicate at least 2-3 hours per week to finding and listing sources down and revisit them whenever we have time on our hands.
Even though the majority of our class had established a research topic by this stage, our lecturer went over a few questions to ask ourselves, making sure the topics we chose are right for us. The purpose of this was because he wanted us to choose a topic that we would be motivated to research, rather than it being a chore and for assignment purposes only. He exaggerated the “Why” and “What” questions, making us think “Why am I researching this?” and “What do I want the reader to gain from this?”.
To understand what to put in our proposal, our lecturer said it’s useful to know what we are going to put into our actual thesis; therefore, he went over the thesis structure. Even though our objective by the end of June is to finish our proposal, he advised we get the literature review, methodology, and themed topic chapters as sorted as possible. Towards the end of the lecture, our lecture highlighted the key steps of the proposal, outlining a few topics that we would be focusing on within the upcoming weeks.
The Key Steps:
- Establish a theme or topic. This may develop and fine as we research but will be important to establish precisely before completing all necessary research and establishing the final structure.
- Introduction, the statement on the issue, topic to be investigated, and purpose of the report.
- Methodology; describe the methods that we used for our research. We will also need to demonstrate why we chose to use them and how we applied them.
- Critical Review of literature informing the research and how we used our sources to investigate the topic and achieve objectives or answer the question.
- Investigation of options based on evidence. Main discussion and finds with citations. Sub-headings are recommended.
- Conclusions or recommendations to the audience based on findings.
Towards the end of the lecture, our lecturer went through the guidelines for thesis writing, referencing, and citations, showing us multiple examples of the correct format to use depending on where our sources came from.
This Week’s Task:
Our lecturer didn’t give us a task to do for this week as he treated this week’s lecture as a recap session just in case our class forgot a few stuff over the Easter holidays. However, he recommended we read a paper by Dr. Jennifer Rowley on “Conducting a Literature Review” this week if we have additional time. Other than that, he just advised us to have the thesis proposal structure set out on a document, adding content towards it gradually.