You are halfway through your degree. As a second year and like many other students, you may not have given any thought to your dissertation. With your second Christmas as an undergraduate over, it’s time to start considering the largest and most important single project of your degree. But how do you go about choosing a subject?
The Best Dissertation Topic Are Created
The idea of a dissertation is not to “find” the right title, but to create one. Ultimately, you are looking to fill a gap in the existing research. Did you find an interesting question or puzzling aspect of a research project from your degree that you wanted to explore in a bit more depth? These make the best dissertations.
Write What You Know
The most important piece of advice is one of the most common ever given to a writer: write what you know. It’s a sensible move to look at the subjects that you are most interested in. After all, you will retain the most information about these subjects and find it easier to process new information in the existing framework of your knowledge. If you ‘ve tailored your degree modules to a certain area of study within the discipline it’s the sensible choice anyway.
Identify Your Strengths
This is as much about the subject as it is about your methodology. Do you have certain strengths (such as statistical analysis, data collection, CAD etc) that you could incorporate? If you have a talent for these method, then you should certainly attempt to work them into your dissertation or maybe even make the dissertation largely about that method. Your dissertation is worth a large percentage of your degree mark and you owe it to yourself to choose a subject at which you know you’ll excel.
Don’t Retread Old Ground
The most important thing is not to go over old ground. There will be subjects covered by many other students in the past. If you’ve had a lecture on a certain area of study and the lecturer has covered many different bases, it’s probably not a good idea to choose that subject again. You are unlikely to find anything new. However, case studies are not always a bad idea. If the lecturer posed a question in the lecture, then discuss with them the possibility of turning the question into a dissertation.
Make it Challenging
While you should play to your strengths, your title and subject will be rejected if you don’t make it challenging enough. A dissertation is not merely a lengthy essay. You will be expected to produce an original piece of work with your own proposition, analysis and results. Dissertations are not graded on results, but on research, analysis and conclusions – they are looking for originality. Even if you find nothing, you have found something. Therefore, your dissertation should be challenging from a research point of view.