General information:
The IOCM Thesis Workshop is a tailor-made workshop for our IOCM students to prepare their final theses. In there are two sessions in the first / second and fifth / sixth week.
Communication takes places via email. The supervisors are sending around the exact dates of the workshop. They also assign discussant roles. A minimum of three participants is foreseen.
All students are required to attend both meetings in person (except for unavoidable absences, which need prior approval).
Timelines prior to the workshops (summer term, ST, and winter term, WT):
- Individual discussions for brainstorming/topic identification with supervisor: ST by 1 October of the previous year; WT by 1 April
- Submission of an idea sketch (2-3 pages): ST by 31 January; WT by 31 July
- Thesis workshop block I in the first or second week of the semester
- Thesis workshop block II in the fifth of sixth week of the semester
- Afterwards individual supervision.
Procedure of the thesis workshops:
For the workshops, you are required to prepare an thesis proposal for your MA thesis and take over a discussant role of another participant's paper. For the first workshop session, an early draft of about 7 pages is expected. For the second session, this will be revised and extended to a full draft of about 10 pages.
During the sessions, each participant shall briefly introduce the exposé and focus on open questions (five minutes only), then the discussant takes over (ten minutes), followed by a general discussion.
Structure and content of thesis proposal:
Besides an introduction that pitches the topic and lays out the structure of the paper, your thesis proposal should contain at least four sections: a state of the art, a presentation of the theory you use, your methods and a preliminary table of contents.
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