Do Your Best to Come Up with Good Thesis Topics: Guidelines for Students

A good thesis topic can have a very positive effect not just on your motivation ability to write a great thesis but can have a positive impact on whoever is marking your work.

A good thesis topic does not replace writing a good thesis but it goes someway to help your focus on the content of your thesis. There are some people who can write about the most uninteresting and tedious topics and make them ‘pop’, but we are not all that creative.

So, where to start?

• In your field of study, pick out an area of interest that you personally find interesting. It may be an aspect that during the course of study you felt you would like to know more about or you may have already started doing some extra reading and research.
• Make a list of the topics that interest you. Also look online for list of thesis topics. It may be that the list provides you will extra ideas or different slants on the ideas that you already have. The lists are easily accessible but just make sure that you are looking a website that offers a list that has serious topics that are achievable.
• If you now have your areas or interest and topic, now may be a good time to chat with your professor or tutor about your ideas. This does not mean that your ideas are set in stone, but it’s a starting point for your planning. Your professor or tutor may feel that you are now ready to start on the next stage of planning.
• It is really important that you start this dialogue early as many students feel they have a great idea, make a start on their work without advice from their supervisor only to find that the work on the thesis may be inappropriate or unmanageable.
• Start thinking about your hypothesis. Again you need to be very clear with what you are going to test. To begin with your hypothesis will be quite awkward, but the more you talk to other people including other students the more the words you are using become more refined. What starts off as a paragraph will soon whittle down to one or two sentences which are ideal for a hypothesis.

If you find at any point that your thesis topic is not turning out well, you may have chosen the wrong topic for you. Briefly the advice is choose something that interests you, keep it simple and defined, talk with your professor and keep talking about your thesis.