5. Thesis and Graduation

About

This is the final act of your MSc study. Here you find guidelines, rules and tips to support your project management. Take some time to read it all before you ask help from (potential) supervisors, professors, the Graduation Coordinator(s), the Programme Coordinator, SPA or secretaries.

Purpose

The aim of this individual project (valued at 30 EC) is twofold: First, to deep-dive in a (new) topic of your own liking, to learn new tools, improve your skills and (in most cases) work in for an external organisation. Second, it allows us to test if you fulfil these academic requirements:

• Research quality: You become master of your graduation topic and contribute to the reduction of one (or more) research gap(s) you identified in your problem analysis. You write a scientific paper with the highlights of your work;
• Research competences: You initiate, manage and plan your work effectively and efficiently. You meet your supervisors and other experts (on site/online) regularly to discuss your progress. You use these discussions to improve your work; 
• Reporting skills: You produce thesis documents (chapters or sections), which together lead to a final thesis report that meets the requirements as described in the TIL Master Thesis Grading rubric (use this during your project);
• Presentation skills: You are able to present and discuss intermediate project results with your supervisors and present and defend the final results convincingly.

The TIL programme is interdisciplinary, which means that your topic is studied from several perspectives. You apply theory and methods related with these perspectives, which usually have been taught in earlier MSc (and BSc) courses.

Start requirements

Compare your OSIRIS status with the requirements for a thesis; have you passed all courses of your individual program? If not, what is missing? Is this allowed according to the regulations? Contact SPA to solve open issues. Discuss remaining questions with the Programme Coordinator.

Process

This thesis portal primarily focuses on the thesis process, because the content of your thesis is not predetermined, but case-specific. You elaborate a topic by blending ideas, literature, field research, commissioner ~, TU Delft supervisor~ and other expertise.