Beginning graduate school is overwhelming. Graduate programs are not simply continuations of undergraduate degrees, they involve learning of new ideas and preparing your career trajectory.
The undergraduate programs combine several fields at once. It is at this level where you exposed to many unrelated but important fields during your studies. As you make a step further and enters masters level, you are expected to specify on what you want to do.
Your master’s degree and the thesis are key weapons that will help you in your entire career field. You, therefore, need to choose a suitable master’s thesis. To be clear, there is no such thing as a bad thesis topic.
The main question to ask yourself is, does the thesis topic prepares you well for a career trajectory rather than setting yourself to various jobs which are unrelated to you?
When choosing a suitable thesis topic, you need to follow these 5 rules. With these, you'll be in the best sides of academic history.
1. You must like the topic.
Free advice to you, if you want to choose a topic, do yourself a favor and pick something you like. Without this, you will not benefit from it. Majority of students who exit their programs do so because they chose something they did not like.
You know what your passion is and the kind of issues you would like to address or see addressed. The next reason why you must like it is that you will sell it within the job market or during your Ph.D. studies.
It feels good to communicate excitedly about your thesis with people of your academic field or the job market where you will prove your expertise, and that you had covered some of the key issues in your thesis.
2. Time is everything; it must be done quickly.
Choosing a topic that can be completed quickly is very important to you as a student. How do you do you that? By picking a thesis topic that is concise.
The topic will expand as you proceed on with your research. The more thesis is written, the more the topic expand.
The next key tip under this is that pick something which already has an established path. Do not waste your precious time reinventing the wheel. Instead, go for a topic where you can get easy data.
Thesis primarily builds more knowledge on the already existing path. Also, it can change the direction of what already exists to something new.
Do not stress yourself by picking some ambiguous topic which has difficult --to- find early works.
3. The trajectory is key.
The topic should give you a possibility to work on your Ph.D. programs in the future. It is okay and necessary to think ahead. Let it be something which will open for you a career path/trajectory.
Doing a Ph.D. may be optional but you need to have the options. There are several young professors current in universities. How do you think they reached that level ?
The answer is that they picked a topic which aligned with what they wanted to do at Ph.D. levels. In most cases, you will find that these young professors have the same topics right from their undergraduate levels to the Ph.D. levels.
They are bright minds who had known the power of career trajectory. You too should do the same.
4. Let it be Job Oriented
As a student, you are required to think beyond your academics. Do your homework and know the requirements the employers want.
How can you be different from other students who have the same master’s degree? Knowledge about job requirement is everything.
Some jobs will require a peer-reviewed article. If that is the case in your career line, then talk to your supervisor and see if they can allow you to write the thesis in form of an article.
At this level, work experience is more important than the grades. Just get yourself something like a cool B and work more on the work experience. If you can get that A, then congratulation, go ahead.
5. Preeminent Team.