Today marks one year I finished my masters.
One year ago at 3pm I was defending my MSc Thesis by video-conference (mid Covid19 pandemic). I had a 3-monitor setup: one for me in presenter mode, one for the presentation and shared to the jury, and the third for my at-home audience.
Remembering this got me thinking in all the tech that helped me keep organized and focused and eventually a MSc. So today I’ll be sharing the tools I used during my dissertation, for writing and organization purposes (not for development).
Google Calendar
At the start I added all official deadlines shared by my school with notifications along the way. A good rule to plan your time, being that one semester or one year, is to allocate 20% of the duration of your thesis to research, 50% to development and 30% to evaluation. I marked these dates in my calendar to keep me on track.
Keep in mind that your expectations at the beginning are destined to change, but it’s always good to have a starting point and reevaluate the plan along the way.
Microsoft Word
I wrote my thesis in Word. I had been using Word for all my projects’ reports and courses’ summaries so I was quite comfortable with Word automations and moods.
Notes
I used my phone stock notes app to add those ideas that come to you in the middle of the day (or night, or weekend).
Google Keep
Google Keep as a to-do list.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar was essential to find research related to the subject I was studying.
Mendeley
I used Mendeley to save all research related to the thesis. What I love about this tool is its feature to edit the papers in-app (highlight text, add notes, etc.). Other tools, like Zotero, makes you open each paper outside in a pdf-reader which takes precious time.
I also used Mendeley’s tags to tag each paper with its key features. This made it easier to understand what solutions could be compared and which were the best match to what I was developing.
Draw.io
I have 40 figures in my thesis, all done using Draw.io. From flowcharts, network diagrams and graphs you can do anything using this tool.
Thesaurus
My native language is Portuguese but I wrote my thesis in English so sometimes the right word didn’t come to mind. Thesaurus helps you find good synonyms for words so you don’t have to repeat “therefore” a thousand times.
Overleaf
During my thesis I co-wrote an article on the solution I was developing to be submitted in LaTex. We used Overleaf, an online LaTex editor, so my supervisor could review my part.
Typora
After meeting with my supervisors I always took the time to write a minute of the meeting with as many details as possible. I started using a notebook, moved on to .txt files and ended up using markdown in Typora (which I still use for work).
To have a record to go back to, of what was decided and why, really helped me specially in those moments you are not quite sure how to proceed.
Dropbox
And finally, for a cloud system I used Dropbox.
Final Note
As a final note, many universities offer a small course/workshop that you can attend. Some also publicly share good practices guidelines to keep you focused during your thesis.
I’ll leave you with a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) mindset that helped me keep me focused: “It’s better to have a solution you can prove (a.k.a evaluate) it enriches the state-of-the-art, than have a too-many-features solution you can’t prove its worth”.