September 26, 2021
Master's in Gender Studies: Thesis Course
Hi everyone,
The Autumn is finally here in Linköping, Sweden, and along with the chilly weather usually, the academic fall semester brings in a lot of responsibilities, the MASTER THESIS!!!
I have a super long story when it comes to writing my thesis and I think it goes back to 20217… or 2018. I can not even remember properly anymore, but anyway to make the long story short, I had back then followed the course of the Master’s Thesis and I have proposed the topic of my choice and an overview of what I would write about. Then life happened and I did not manage to complete the writing process, bringing me to the spring semester 2021, when I was FINALLY sure that I will be able to finalize it. Of course, when things are not meant to happen an accident happened and my dog Rea decided to bite my hand in three (3) different places and one of the wounds being very deep, I was not able to type for a few weeks. At least, I was able to follow the course though and the obligatory parts of it and now I am just focusing to write the fresh and new topic I have proposed. For more details of my thesis topic, you will be able to read next week in another blog post!
The course is taken at the end of the first year and it offers 15 ECTS credits. Practically, it is divided into the following stages:
- A preliminary proposal of the thesis topic/theme of approximately 250 words. This is an important step as the students are assigned to a supervisor accordingly.
- The next step is to submit the 70% manuscript, which means that most of the writing should be done in order for the supervisor to be able to give appropriate feedback to the student.
- After the aforementioned step, the student is due to submit the final draft of the thesis manuscript to the supervisor. This step will define is the thesis is ready to be submitted for defense or not.
- And the last step, if everything looks good, is the defense. A master thesis defense includes a short presentation of the thesis by the student, comments, and evaluation by another student, comments, and evaluation by the examiner.
The thesis should be approximately 12.000 to 18.000 words or 30-40 pages. It is a bit scary even though it is not a very big thesis work. Especially, for the first-year students, the level of analysis according to the theories and knowledge should be more basic compared to the second-year master’s thesis. I am a bit terrified of how I will manage this project, but the time has come that I am about to finish up the Master’s Programme: Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change once and for all.
I hope you have found some useful information in my blog post and comment if there are any questions you may have that I haven’t included in my article.
Looking forward to having you around for my next blog post!
All the best,
M.