Students designing their own dissertation topics

The dissertation module is a bit of a weird one! It is a second semester module, but in the first semester the students needs to get their topics. That means that I have to make sure all the documentation is ready by the start of the first term, and that I have managed to get all the staff to submit possible topics (and submit my own share, of course). Then in the autumn, the big job happens: I have to assign a topic and supervisor to each student. Last year it was almost 200 of them! It is quite a job.

Most students just choose a topic from a list. But every year I encourage them to design their own topic. They can! And then if I am convinced the project is feasible, they can go find a supervisor for it. They have to get it past me because some of the staff in the more popular fields of science (marine mammals, coral reefs, et cetera) otherwise might get inundated. But it does mean I have quite a lot of work to do on it.

As I write this, I have received proposals from 18 students, and given my OK to 6 of them. One student managed to convince me in one go. All the others needed more iterations! And the problem almost always is that they are not specific enough about where they will find the data they need, what exact data they will use, and how they will use it. Often, they will just send a link to a database or something like that, and not explain how they will use it. What variables will they take out of the database, what is the spatial coverage or the time coverage, what are the parameters they will compare it to, and what does their analysis need to yield as an answer for them to accept their hypothesis?  If you just give me the database, that does not tell me whether the project has legs. So I do a lot of emailing to and fro.

The topics the students have designed themselves are quite varied; there is one with marine renewable power, one with seal pup mortality related to storms, one with temperature-dependent sex determination in turtles, one with microplastics, one with whelk size… the possibilities are endless!

Pic by Brocken Inaglory

The deadline has now passed for students to submit the first draft! So everyone who has not proposed anything will just have to pick from the list. That will still be a lot of work for me, but at least less than guiding them to their own projects!