Master’s Thesis Project – process and deadlines

Beginning of November:

The EMTM secretariat provides you with the name of your supervisor.

Middle of November to beginning of December:

Your supervisor will contact you to have a telematic meeting to discuss these initial ideas and give you some directions and suggestions about how you should approach the process of completing and/or fine-tuning the different sections of the final Master’s Thesis proposal.

Beginning of January:

You must send a full first draft proposal to the supervisor as soon as it is ready and never later than the deadline specified in the guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat. Together with this draft of the research proposal you must also fill in and send a draft of the Master’s Thesis contract (a template is included in the guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat). This Master’s Thesis contract contains a section called Supervision Plan, in which you must include a plan of tentative meetings with the supervisor, deliveries of different Master’s Thesis parts’ drafts, etc.

When the supervisor receives this final draft of the Master’s Thesis proposal and the Master’s Thesis contract, feedback will be given to you in the form of either final approval or objections and suggestions for improvement a specific deadline set out in the guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat. In the latter case, you must amend the proposal on the basis of these comments and return it to the supervisor for final approval by a specific deadline set out in the guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat.

15 January no later than 23:00 CET:

When the supervisors approve the proposal, they will send to you the Master’s Thesis contract duly signed, to which you must add your signature, attach the Master’s Thesis proposal, and submit the package as a single pdf file in the individual space in Samepage by January 15th.

Submission deadline:

15 July no later than 12 noon CET is your submission deadline.

There are two places in which you need to submit both your Master’s Thesis and your summary:

• To the EMTM secretariat by e- mail, cc your supervisor – 4 documents (doc/docx and pdf format)
• On Digital Exam in PDF-files only.

You will find all necessary documents/information in relation to the upload of your Master’s Thesis and summary on Digital Exam.

For further instructions, please refer to the instructions in the Master’s Thesis Guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat.

As soon as your SDU study secretary receives the information from the EMTM secretariat on the fact that you will be writing your Master’s Thesis with an SDU supervisor, you will be registered for the Master’s Thesis in SDU’s systems.

You have 6 months to write the Master’s Thesis. The term starts on 15 January and ends on 15 July of the corresponding year. If you fail to comply with the 6-months’ deadline, or the Master’s Thesis is assessed as “failed”, you have used one attempt and are automatically signed up for a second one. Then, a new Master’s Thesis contract, encompassing a revised full research proposal and supervision plan, signed by you and your supervisor, must be entered into:

• no later than 14 days after the expiry of the first deadline, if you did not submit the Master’s Thesis;
• or no later than 14 days after the publication of the assessment, if you submitted the Master’s Thesis, but it was assessed as “failed”.

Then, you have a new term of three months to submit the Master’s Thesis, i.e. 15 October for the second attempt and 15 January for the third attempt, if the reason for using the second and third attempt is failure to submit.

If you fail to submit the Master’s Thesis on a second attempt or the Master’s Thesis is assessed as “failed”, you have used two attempts and are automatically signed up for a third and last one, following the same procedure described above for the second attempt.

You are automatically signed up for second and third attempts even if you did not submit the Master’s Thesis contract signed by you and your supervisor on time.

Length

Your master thesis main text, without title page, preliminary pages, references and appendices, needs to have between 22,500 and 40,000 words. The equivalent in pages is 60 and 100 pages, for the main text.

References, title, format, corporate logo types and recommended structure

Please refer to the Master Thesis Guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat.

Summary

The summary is a second document of 5 pages that must be provided separately. It is a separate and original text. Accordingly, you are not allowed to elaborate it by copying word by word sections of the Master’s Thesis manuscript. Furthermore, in the summary you must cover the most relevant points of your Master’s Thesis. Note also that you must cite the sources you use and include them in a list of references.

As a general rule, the time dedicated to supervising one Master’s Thesis should be between 8 and 10 hours.

For further details, please refer to the Master Thesis Guidelines sent to you be the EMTM secretariat.

The assessment is based on the content and structure of the written master thesis, the compliance with the commitments of the Working Plan (document agreed and signed by student and supervisor), and the quality of the Master’s Thesis process in terms of research, cooperation and discussions made in the meetings with the supervisor. There is no oral defence of the Master’s Thesis.

For further details on the assessment criteria, please refer to the Master Thesis Guidelines sent to you by the EMTM secretariat.

When you submit your Master’s Thesis, your study secretary makes sure that your Master’s Thesis and Master’s Thesis Summary are available to the two evaluators: the supervisor and the external censor on Digital Exam.

The supervisor and the censor assess the Master’s Thesis and write a structured 1-2 page Assessment Report and registers your grade in SDU’s systems, so that you are able to see the grade on the student self-service portal.

The supervisor sends the agreed and signed Assessment Report to your study secretary, who forwards it to you and to the EMTM secretariat in due time before the graduation.