Of the 750,000 master's students busy writing a thesis, about 80 percent will get their degrees and go to work, using the degrees to advance their careers. Only one out of five thesis-writing master's students advance to doctoral programs.
Despite these statistics, most advising professors consider the master's thesis merely the forerunner of a dissertation--probably because that's the way it was for them. As a result, many don't expect much from a master's thesis. They believe because the thesis is a student's first attempt at scholarly research, it won't make a significant, original, contribution to the field, and it won't be publishable.
Graduate students absorb these diminished expectations and set their performance criteria accordingly. So each year thousands of below-standard master's theses are written, laid to rest on library shelves, and forgotten. This waste of time and talent is deplorable because it takes almost as much effort to write a bad thesis as a good one. In fact, it should be easier today than ever before to write outstanding theses, because information is so much more available, and so many master's students are adult professionals who bring greater expertise and experience to the task.
It's foolish to invest the time and money for a master's degree and leave school essentially empty handed. Maximize the return on your investment in graduate school by designing your thesis to "pay off" for you, either in professional advancement, or in cold, hard cash--or, better yet, in both! Style your master's thesis on one, two, or all three of the following patterns:
Or choose a topic that lets you work with a mentoring professor who is well known and/or well connected to the commercial field. In today's business world it's who you know, as much as what you know, that pays off. The important thing is to choose a topic with a clear tie to your future job.
If you need your degree in minimum time, with minimum thesis effort, write a nonstandard, nontraditional thesis. Become an expert and gain skills in something you want to do, not something you're doing now. Writing a thesis related to your current job. which is by far the easiest tack to take, is a good strategy if you have a degree-dependent job opportunity (e.g., a promotion) waiting.
To introduce the quality of marketability, you'll need to take a fresh, creative approach to the thesis--and probably without help from your advisor. Neither administrators nor advising professors are concerned with helping you create marketable products or make significant career moves. You'll likely be on your own to design a thesis that promotes you as a professional expert and authority, jumpstarts a new career, or provides you with a marketable product.
Look for problems in your field that are unsolved, or poorly solved. Seek unanswered questions. Find processes that are clumsy, time-consuming, expensive, and need improvement. Look for new ideas, tools, software, hardware, that haven't yet been fully exploited, and find new and better things to do with them. Perhaps more than any other breakthrough, the computer has created new research, communication, and marketing opportunities for scholars. Tie your thesis to computers however you can. Here are some possibilities to get you started:
The payoffs for a thesis which will earn money are more than monetary. You'll put more time and energy into something that promises greater financial payoff. You'll be motivated to do a good job and stick with it. You'll be more likely to do something of value for yourself and the field. And you'll hang in until you're done and graduate.
It's precisely because administrators and faculty typically downplay the master's thesis that today's more sophisticated students have a unique opportunity to design the thesis to be optimally self-serving. This opportunity dissipates at the doctoral level when research funding and famous professors and the "pursuit of science" become major variables in the topic-selection equation. So take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a committee of bright and talented professors help you assemble a marketable thesis. And make your thesis pay off.
Make Your Thesis Pay Off is taken from Thesis News No. 1-1994, published January 1994. Other articles in this issue include:
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