Wednesday, June 30, 2004
MSc Dissertation support links
I'm in London this week, working in the library when I'm not in sessions for MSc Dissertation support week (every afternoon) or attending a session of presentations about our projects with a third of the MSc in OR students (yesterday morning). I enjoyed hearing about others' projects. That there are so many and various potential applications of OR is one of the reasons I'm so glad I did this degree. It was fun listening to ideas on project approaches and potential pitfalls, in the the questions and comments from both the supervisors (lecturers and professors, mostly) and the other students.
Seth asked the easy questions about my project, "So do you consider this a Soft OR project, Christina?" "No, really not at all," I answered. James Gibb accused me of making up the term "render wrangler" before advising me again to "underpromise and overdeliver... not that I've ever managed to do that." Overall the presentation went well and I think I'm on the right track. I've downloaded a bunch of papers about load-balancing to see if there are other strategies I should consider.
The dissertation support sessions have been useful so far. Monday I learned about how to deal with tricky citation issues. Yesterday there were two, the first one emphasising the importance of not plagiarising. The second one on structuring paragraphs was surprisingly entertaining and informative. It was given by Neil McLean of the LSE Language Centre. He's got the teach-them-with-humour thing down cold.
He started off with the three things you need to demonstrate with academic writing at the Masters level:
* that you can think "It's a university and they tend to insist."
* that you read the books "You don't necessarily need to read the books, you just have to show you read the books. [...] If you use the Harvard system you can show you spent all your time in the library and none of your time in The Three Tuns."
* that you have real-world knowledge (no snarky commentary here)
He then went on to discuss the principles of paragraph structure in the British academic model. "And this is culturally specific. In Spanish, you're allowed to digress, to explore other ideas. [...] In a British academic setting: 1 paragraph, 1 idea, please don't confuse us."
He had many ideas for making reading your dissertation easier for your marker, because that makes the marker happy, leading to better marks. "Tired people -- I've just had a baby so I know all about this -- tired people get much more crotchety." One of the ideas was to create a paragraph plan for each paragraph in a section and figure out the logical order for them before writing the section. "The planning stage will take a little more time... I'm sure for many of you, the planning stage is taking very little time at the moment." The plan contains the topic and concluding/linking sentence for each paragraph, as well as bullet points on the ~3 arguments you present to back up the topic sentence. "Three is a good number for arguments. Sometimes it's two, sometimes it's four. If it's five, you need another paragraph. If it's one, you need to go back to the library."
In critiquing a well-constructed sentence that argued it's difficult to describe the Norwegian foreign political tradition, Neil McKay said it's not the sort of sentence you want to give to your marker. "Because remember, you are a genius, expert in your field. You want to give them arguments they can give you marks for, instead of saying... [shrug] I dunno."
Today's workshop session with Peter Levin wasn't quite as funny, but his study skills website is another useful resource, particularly the notes on planning and writing your dissertation.
And links, mostly for me, from the citation and plagiarism slides:
Quote Unquote: The Harvard Style of Referencing Published Material
Cite them Right
On citing electronic sources
International Standard ISO 690-2 on referencing electronic documents
Online!: a reference guide to using internet sources
Manchester Metropolitan University links on citation
(all the above links from Dr. Jane Secker, June 2004)
Research student toolbox
LSE statement on plagiarism
Plagiarism can be cheating or genuine error
Common knowledge and steps to avoid plagiarising by mistake (from Purdue University's OWL site)
