You should have high expectations of our supervision, but so do we of you. While you can expect meetings with us every couple of weeks, or even weekly, this is not a matter of course. We receive a ‘teaching credit’ of only 0.45 SWS per supervised thesis. This is equivalent to 5 hours of supervision – not per week or month, but in total! We are glad to provide excellent supervision and invest more time and resources if needed, but this must not be a one-way street.
If you expect us to spend more time than we have to, we expect you to work harder than you have to: not necessarily more time, but we expect very high motivation, full focus on your project, professional behavior & communication, and the will to achieve. If you just want to pass your thesis with minimal effort, that’s fine, we will still supervise you. But if you only do the bare minimum, so will we (5 hours total, i.e., 3 meetings plus feedback once on your thesis draft).
Also, keep in mind that a Master’s thesis at the University of Siegen is expected to last 26 weeks, nearly full-time (total of 900 hours of work; 34 hrs per week). A Bachelor’s thesis takes place over the duration of 18 weeks, and you need to spend around 360 hours, i.e., 20 hours per week.
We hope that you will conduct excellent research during your Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis, as most of our previous students do. Excelling in research means publishing research articles in good conferences or journals. Consequently, we hope that your thesis will lead to the publication of a research article.
More precisely, we hope that you will produce the following deliverables as part of your thesis.
Poster paper
Even though this is called a ‘poster’, it is not really a poster but a ~4-page paper in single-column ACM format. The structure of a poster paper is typical as follows.
- Introduction
- Related Work
- Methodology
- Results & Discussion
- Limitations & Future Work (Optional)
- References
You should consider the poster as the first iteration of your work in which you present initial results, e.g. how your novel algorithm performs on one or two datasets. If your poster is of a high standard, you may already submit it to a conference or workshop. We recommend that you complete sections 1-3 within one month after starting your thesis. Section 4+5 should then be completed roughly within another month or two.
Full- or Short paper
Once you complete the poster, you will conduct additional experiments and extend all sections. The resulting document represents the 2nd iteration of your work and should have around 4-10 pages in single-column ACM Format (+ references). It should be completed around 1-2 months before submitting your final thesis.
Bachelor / Master Thesis
Once you have written your full paper, writing your final thesis will be easy. The final thesis will be basically an extended version of your paper, in which everything is described in a bit more detail, possibly but not necessarily with some additional experiments. The official guidelines at the University of Siegen expect a Master’s thesis to be between 60 and 120 pages, and a Bachelor’s thesis up to 60 pages, but in a very ‘generous’ layout. Those 60-120 pages would probably be equivalent to 30-60 pages in the ACM double-column format. Either way, page numbers are not set in stone. It’s the quality of the content that counts!
Pre-Print
If your poster or full/short paper is not accepted by a workshop or conference, we would expect that you publish one of them as a pre-print e.g. on arXiv.org.