No more proposals for dissertation topics

The deadline has been, the students can't neighbour anymore! What a relief. I do like the concept of the students doing that, but it is so much work. It is so much that I will have to change the procedure next year. This just consumed all my time.

There are some students who have a clear idea, and then it's not much of a burden. Occasionally, a student gets their proposal approved in one go. Sometimes you have to ask a few clarifications and then they're good to go. But there are also students who just haven't quite grasped what is needed. And some of them then start using the scattergun approach. And if they don't quite know what they want to do, they often use an awful amount of text to communicate it. Not because they have a concerted attempt at shrouding their lack of data with which to answer a clear research question in a fog of prose, but that sort of is the effect of it. 

Some students in fact just want to do a literature study, and then they might just dig out some data and say they will do statistical analysis on it in order to make it look more thorough. But if the data and the analysis are not connected to the research question, I won't give it my OK. Sometimes you can also tell that they're bluffing; sometimes the statistical analysis they claim they want to do is fundamentally impossible to perform on the data they offer.

In the end there were 35 students who sent me at least one attempt. 15 of these got their proposal approved. I'm still not entirely sure how many students I have in the cohort; the last count was 191. So 18% had a go, and 8% pulled it off. And the topics were very varied.

Next year I will put some limitations in place. I might set a maximum number of iterations students can submit. That will get rid of the scattergun approach. And I want to make sure that you can get a standard response. So far I always reply with a personalised message, but I think I will have to tell the students they might just get a standard response that says things such as "exact nature of data insufficiently specified" or "data provided insufficient to answer research question". It will be so much quicker! And I can provide an explanation on the module website of what the various responses can mean in detail.

For this year, the burden has now gone from dealing with the proposals of the own topics, to allocating everybody else at topic from the list. That is a big job as well! I hope it will be OK this year…

A sea urchin, the main character in one of the proposals. Pic by Frédéric Ducarme