Dissertations - Uni

MATTeL said:
10,000 words in 4 weeks is nothing, unless you have done no research or other work. If that is the case then you are screwed... you had at least one year to do this, no sympathy.

I have written longer reports for work.
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Yea that's easy enough, I'm doing the research and writing it and getting through it in reasonble time all inside of 2 weeks, I reckon I could have done it in a week I'f I'd really pushed myself. God only knows why you get a year to do this, it's not really that difficult at all. Then again, for my dissertation I have no experiments to do or results to collect, it's more like a super-extended essay really.

I won't go into specifics, but my dissertation is essentially answering a couple of questions about National Socialism and nationalist-volkish thought in Germany pre-1930s, indeed it begins before the unification in 1871. I'm not sure how much the average person knows about pre-Third Reich, post-Holy Roman Empire political thought in Germany, about the idea of 'volksgameinschaft' etc, it's really interesting if you are into political history ...maybe not so if you aren't :)
 
Well, I think I'm about finished.

I went slightly over my word limit tody, but got in all the content I had planned. I've spent this evening rewording bits of it to get the wordcount down but now it reads slightly disjointed as bits have been trimmed and moved about.

I'm going to stop now (not working til 3am like last night). Tomorrow I'll get the parents to help me proof read it and suggest bits that need rewording, and then hopefully get that sorted tomorrow afternoon being going for more pints than are healthy for me tomorrow night!
 
i had to do 15k words for mine, i imported pictures and figures, i made spacing between words little bigger, made an index, and after all that, i only did just under 14k words, took me 3 weeks and it was late so lost 10% of my marks. Had to do post war economics of southern eu nations, it was boring.
 
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MATTeL said:
10,000 words in 4 weeks is nothing, unless you have done no research or other work. If that is the case then you are screwed... you had at least one year to do this, no sympathy.

I have written longer reports for work.
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Great post...

Fool, how do you know i've had no family bereavements/problems with supervisors in this time? Think before you post...

If you actually bothered to read the thread you'd have noticed i finished it with plenty of time to spare...
 
thankfully i'm a few months of starting my dissertation, i'm finding being a measly 2nd year hard enough at the moment!
i have 4 x 2'000 word essays due in either may or the beginning of june
this doesn't sound bad, i know, but in that time i will also be on clinical placement, have 2 weeks of on and off exams
plus i am possible the laziest person ever, which doesn't help :p
so if anyone knows anything about nitric oxide.... :)
 
I had a good day today. I hit 15k! Our word 'limit' is 10k, so erm.. woops! :p

I'm not gonna cut it down as my tutor was happy with it and also with what i had left to do. I cant believe i hit 15k! Just got some minor formatting (page numbers, chapter headings etc.) and i'm done. Printing on Monday and hand-ins on Wednesday. Woo! :D:D

Speaking of formatting - is anyone out there using OpenOffice? I had a quick walk-through how to 'unlink' stuff in the head/footer in Word but havent really looked at doing it in OO yet. If anyone has done it - a quick guide would be much appreciated to help me get it done a bit quicker! :) :x
 
Surely keeping the work within a reasonable margin of the word limit is part of the exercise? ...you've gone over by 50% :eek: ...in any case, it certainly is for me, I will get penalised if I stray from the word limit by more than 10% either way.
 
Moeks said:
Surely keeping the work within a reasonable margin of the word limit is part of the exercise? ...you've gone over by 50% :eek: ...in any case, it certainly is for me, I will get penalised if I stray from the word limit by more than 10% either way.
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There were rumours of that, but really - considering the work is handed in solely as a printout how are they going to know? Thats essentially what my tutor said when i told her i could probably hit 14k!

I understand your point, but reducing my wordcount would hugely dent the overall balance of my dissertation :(

EDIT: Plus there is no mention of it in our criteria reference grid *phew*
 
Arhh ok fair enough, just making sure you weren't talking yourself into a false sense of security :) ...all my work has to be handed in as printed and electronically, then it's scanned by plagarism software and the word-count is checked etc.
 
Moeks said:
...all my work has to be handed in as printed and electronically, then it's scanned by plagarism software and the word-count is checked etc.
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Well now you're scaring me! :eek::p;) heh.
 
We have to hand in ours electronically too.

They busted some guy last year who saved some text as a GIF image and inserted that to save his wordcount. They spotted it and weren't too impressed.

Our word limit is stictly 10k. alledegly anything over 10k in the main body won't be read... although I'm not sure how much of that is true, and how much is because they are lazy and don't want people handing in stupid big reports!
 
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Did mine in 3 days, 12000 words ... found it to be the easiest part of the project :D

The coding of the actual software took me much longer :(

Now regularly do 20k word count reports in less than 2 days at work, have to say I enjoy it too :eek: :o
 
Bah i'm getting really stuck formatting my contents etc. :\

I figured just using bullets and indentation (using bullets generated the numbers 4.3.1 etc. automatically which was handy), but simply adding ..............00 and aligning to the end of the page doesnt work as theyre all slightly out :(

I wish we'd been given a seminar or something on how to properly format all this stuff, everyone seems to be blagging it :(

Whats the proper way to stuff like that^? :confused:

(Using OpenOffice)
 
17,817 an I've yet to cover the key areas. Slightly concerned as the word limit is 10k suggested, 15k max. It's going to be a case of cutting out the vast swathes of rubbish that's in there, plus the several pages of 'Screw Flanders'. Got til the coming Friday. Crumbs.

Must crack on...
 
I've spent the whole day in Uni today getting mine printed out, organising it and then having it binded. Cost a pretty penny to at £43 for two copies including binding. It's a huge relief to have it done and out the way until my Viva.

Anyway, here's a picture my mate took with his mobile of ours side by side. Mine are the two on the right. For all of those people still working at it, good luck! :)
Image025.jpg
 
I did 22,000 words :) The feeling of having it bound and thinking "I WROTE this" was awesome.

Got a decidedly ":|" grade for it, but still :p
 
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