Writing the Thesis

By Arzu Maharramova, May 2024

The very final tasks to complete to be able to graduate from MUNI are the Thesis and the Final State Exam. The first step is to find a supervisor that best fits you. You can select either the guarantor of your program, your supervisor, or any other professors from the program. Selecting the most suitable supervisor for yourself makes this process 10 times easier. U can see the supervisor as the main source of help for your thesis. I was lucky that even though I did not have experience in writing a thesis during my bachelor's, my supervisor explained everything patiently to me to be able to transfer my thesis to its best form possible.

There are 2 ways of doing research for your thesis: primary and secondary research. Before starting to conduct the research for a thesis, I would suggest looking for books in the FSS library to learn how to conduct academic research itself. Knowing the main rules of conducting research is very important in this process. It will also help you to decide what kind of research is the most suitable for you.

Before starting to write the thesis, it is important to be aware of the research methods, ethics, limitations, etc.

When you select the title of the thesis, it is important to consider a few factors. First, of course, it has to be something you are interested in because in 1.5 years, you will have to work on it almost every single day and if this topic is not interesting enough for you, at some point you will get burned out from it. Secondly, it will be better to consider every advice of your supervisor about your topic, it will be better to find a topic that is also in their research area so they can help you more. Third, your thesis title should be as specific as possible, which means it sounds quite long when someone asks about it. A more general topic seems easier to research, but the thesis has a standard length and to be able to fulfill the length requirement and not to get lost in the information junk, it is important to keep it specific.

The next step is selecting the main and partial research questions. The main research question is the whole purpose of your thesis. The whole thesis serves to answer that specific question at the end, so it is extremely important to form this question well. Your supervisor will help you during the selection of main and partial research questions.

Partial research questions are some kind of tools to help answer the main research question. So, you have to select them in a way that in the end, all of them will lead to the answer to the main research question.

As the source of information, it is recommended to use only academic sources (books, academic journals and articles). The FSS library and the digital catalogue of MUNI have a lot of resources that will help you conduct your research. I would recommend keeping each source of the information you used somewhere from the day you start writing your thesis until your graduation. Because you never know when you may need to check that specific source again. Categorizing your sources by chapters and sub-chapters of the thesis, by partial research questions will help a lot.

Remember, doesn't matter how specific is your title, there is still more than enough information about it on the internet and other sources. So it is extremely important to know which one of these are useful for you and only consider them. And thesis is not just writing the information you found at one source, you have to add to it something from you. This might sound weird and I think it is obvious that you also have to add your understanding of the topic, but after some time, the thesis you write becomes one part of you and you try to make it as perfect as possible, so you try to find every way to expand its quality. The thesis is not just the completed copy of the information on the internet or books, it is the proof that you deserve to graduate and that all of the education you received during these years is not for nothing.