Wrapping things up

Well, today is a day to seriously mark in the calendars. Today I finally returned my BSc thesis, only a year late. As I might've written quite a while ago, I started my journey in January, 2007. Since then I've had ups and downs and written a total of three theses. The first one was ~75% done before I scrapped it because I wasn't satisfied with the approach and the scoping was proving difficult. The second one was nearly finished but then I lost my briefcase and all digital copies of it, which meant that I had to retype it on the computer. And at the same time I played with the scoping a bit more and rewrote the thesis entirely in English. And this is the version I returned today. Some of the people reading this blog have had the dubious honor of reading some drafts of it lately, and I want to thank those people for all the feedback and suggestions that you gave. Especially regarding all the commas that were in wrong places or were missing. ;)

This journey did actually teach me quite a few things. First of all, I guess it would've been very likely that I would've passed the seminar course with the original thesis. The grade would've also been mediocre, but acceptable. So there is an easy way to approach things and then there's my way. In retrospect, it might've been just wiser to have returned the original paper and gone on towards the MSc at full speed. But having done the rewrites, I also feel that the third time round my touch at writing an academic paper at a rapid pace was getting better. Of course I'm too much a pragmatic personality to ever be able to make a career in the academic world, but oh well.

Secondly, some things I did learn about the writing process was that I think the following worked best for me:

1. Get familiar with the topic at a very broad level. Read a bunch of articles and other material on the subject and begin to gather the reference list. Create a brief mindmap of the aspects that you want to take into account.
2. Devise a general structure for the paper based on the mindmap.
3. Re-read the articles and start throwing thoughts along with citations into the skeleton structure from step 2. (Not marking up the citations right away was my biggest flaw; instead it took too long for me to start writing, at which point I had already synthesized a view of the world for myself and it was difficult to start disecting it into pieces again for the citations.)
4. Open up the bullet points from the structure and begin writing the material into a concrete paper. If you get stuck at some point, just add a yellow TODO tag to the paper and continue somewhere else.
5. When the paper starts having some flesh around the skeleton, stop writing new text and start hammering out the TODO tags. Fix the TODOs with in the simplest possible fashion, but no simpler. I.e. don't go off expanding the scope of the TODO too much. It's already difficult enough to keep a short paper short. In the end you'll always have too much text.
6. Finish the paper, write the intro, conclusion, and the abstracts.
7. Eat Häagen-Dazs.

As for the actual thesis, I won't link it here just yet. But rest assured, I'll post it online once it gets graded and I get around to presenting it in the seminar. I guess I could go on with more introspection, but unfortunately there is no rest for the wicked and I have to continue onwards and begin preparing for an architecture evaluation presentation for tomorrow. I have no idea what I'm going to say, but oh well...