Master thesis panic

Writer: Martin Hansebråten
Translator: Eva Weston Szemes
Illustrator: Ingvild Sperstad

We have reached UKA – the month of partying. This also happens to be the point of the semester where many people realise how big the master thesis is. And how much work there is left (at least if you do a 60-credit thesis. If you do 30 credits, you don’t realise this before March, roughly speaking). Some people, however, haven’t reached this admission (yet), and still have a very ‘demure’ attitude about it.

Another group, and this is the one I consider myself a member of, keep switching between an existential anxiety where it seems your life is over, and that this will all come together and be a complete master thesis in the end. Something it also probably(?) will be. Here at NMBU, there are also other factors affecting the mental health of a master’s student. Both simpler things, like the coffee access (or lack thereof), or bigger, structural decisions around the allocation of thesis topics. Both things, however, affect the everyday life of the master’s student.

Different practises when it comes to distributing the topics across the different faculties makes the whole process difficult. There is no shared process when it comes to this. MINA has a first come, first served principle, while KBM has a strange system that is best described as a mix of taekwondo and the lottery. It it’s stressful to get your hands on a topic, chances are that this stress will continue during the writing process.

Furthermore, the discussion around the use of AI is leaving its mark on this year’s bunch of thesis writers. AI is here to stay, but the rules concerning the use of it are not quite ready yet. In an attempt to fix this, NMBU has come up with a set of rules about our online data processing friends. But these (at the time of writing, suggested) rules are way too vague, and do not reflect the reality of the use of AI across the different courses. For example, the use of AI in coding is not mentioned explicitly in their document, not even once. Only a vague wording concerning its use in data processing. It’s simply not good enough.

The thesis work sometimes feels like a ship loaded with AI ambiguities, advisors with ever-changing schedules, a lack of coffee, and a never-ending stream of work that should have been completed a week ago. And to top it off, you are the one responsible for all of the thesis problems that come up. At the same time, you have a lot of freedom. The freedom to decide to take a day off when needed and work when you have to. The balance between working hard and not burning all of your energy in the beginning, is the most important thing to remember. That might be how to avoid the master thesis panic.

A last message for NMBU: Fix the bloody coffee machine at KBM! To give up and remove the machine, is not the same as solving the problem. When you get up in the morning, there is a higher chance that NMBU has a new rector than that you can buy yourself a coffee before your lecture at Aastveit.