In most countries, bachelor or master students need to finish a thesis (or final-year project) to be eligible for graduation. Although the project length may vary (3 months to one year), it is mainly a research project to carry out some academic exploration of a specific topic. These thesis training not only benefits students, but also mentors in terms of:
- leadership & team management
- teaching load counted
- research progress and implementation I suggest each Postdoc to mentor 3-5 thesis students, and each PhD to mentor 2-3 thesis students.
Please try to be nice and responsible to students.
- Feasible thesis topic:
- Should not be too difficult or hard for those who are without any prior academic experience.
- Should be a narrowed/focused/detailed topic without much exploration space which may make junior students lost.
- Be very clear what students need to do
- Student selection
- Check their CV and transcript to check their capacity and alignment with your project.
- Interview them to check their motivation and personality.
- Ask them to write a detailed research plan based on the literature review on the topic before the formal start/registration.
- Frequent catch-up
- Weekly meeting with students' slides to discuss the progress and plan.
- Share their progress with the professor from time to time.
- GitHub Repo or Google Drive to host all relevant code, documentation, etc.
- Try to teach them to write thesis in LaTex.
- Check detailed information in CIT official website.
- Come up with your thesis topics and put it into our chair website for promotion.
- Thesis length is 6 months, and unlikely to be extended.
- Thesis mentorship can be counted to teaching load, 1 Master = 0.6 ECTS, 1 Bachelor = 0.2 ECTS, sum cap at 2 ECTS.
- All thesis needs to be registered and graded formally in the central system by the professor.
- Some thesis may be carried out in industry, but mainly determined by their manager in industry. May not be relevant but good opportunity to build industry connections.
- In Germany, course grades range from 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (worst), and students with grade <2.5 can be seen as potential good candidates.