We are really glad to work with students and supervise their thesis works. This is an important milestone for your career, being it a Bachelor’s degree or a Masters degree, and we are sure that you want to make it memorable by doing something meaningful. It is also important to know, however, that we yearly supervise a multitude of students and our agenda is really packed. This means that, in order to carry out a good work and to efficiently collaborate, there is a set of guidelines that are very important to follow and to be aware of. Please, take your time and read these carefully, some of them might seem obvious, but they are not.
- Ask us in advance. A decent Bachelor’s thesis work needs at least 4 months, whereas a decent Masters thesis needs 8 months. You could maybe dare to work really hard and shrink it to 3 months (6 months respectively for the Masters), but, honestly, we wouldn’t advise so. If you have less than that we will say no.
- Be proactive. Do not come to us showing that you haven’t read at all the proposals in the PROPOSALS page. You will need to have an idea on what you are willing to work on. We are making an effort to keep such page updated, so, please, use it and read the related documents.
- We are busy. Believe it or not, professors and researchers have sometimes tight schedules and various duties. If we do not reply to your e-mails, then wait up, we may take days. Sometimes we miss them, if you think this is the case contact us again, we are not deliberately ignoring you. Also, avoid sending us one e-mail per day. It is definitely too much and it doesn’t help. The same applies for useless e-mails. If you have meaningful requests, please cluster them in ONE SINGLE e-mail.
- We are not debugging your code. If you have a technical problem (unless it is really really big) it’s your duty to find a solution, not ours. Go online and search, possibly in English as it will yield a much better outcome. Do not send us an e-mail every time something does not work. If you do we will say “RTFM” and your evaluation will not benefit from this. If you really need to ask us, then make sure you have done your best in solving your problem yourself.
- Overleaf. This is the tool that you will need to use to write up your thesis. It is a collaborative editor based on Latex which allows us to monitor your progress on the document and make inline comments. Believe us, once you start using it, you’ll never come back. https://www.overleaf.com/
Also, if you are wondering whether you will need to learn Latex… yes you will have to. - Structure of the Thesis. That’s right, most of the theses we supervise have similar structures. First of all make yourself comfortable with the template you find here. Remember, the abstract is the most important part, you will have to outline your whole work in half a page, as most readers will read nothing else before deciding if it’s worth going further.
- Do not deliver half-baked chapters. We are not going to read your thesis if it is incomplete. Even though we are computer scientists we are very sensitive to a poor quality written Italian and/or English. Before sending us something to check (usually a chapter) make sure it is complete in all its parts and read through it. We cannot fix orthography, typos, syntax and semantics for you.
- Know your deadlines. We are not responsible for reminding you the deadline for uploading your thesis, getting your exams done and similar. It’s your own responsibility. Also, if you need something from us before a certain date, warn us in advance, not the day before.
- Your presentation is how you sell your work. Being it a Bachelor’s or a Masters’ thesis, your presentation is very important, do it properly! Time constraints as well as the number of slides that you can bring is stated in the dedicated page of your course. In general, make it 1 minute per slide (sometimes more, sometimes less). Do not write a lot in the slides. People either listen to you or read the slides, in general they prefer the former, therefore throw a lot of images and SIMPLE bullet points in the slides, not more. You cannot use the University logo in the slides.
- We need to see your presentation. In general, you will be asked to rehearse your presentation in front of your supervisor and the whole IoT Prism Lab so we can all give you advice on how to modify it (whether necessary). This will happen few days before the big day, make sure you’re ready.
Good luck y’all