Seed money scholarship for PhD students in CBU

I was lucky to be in the bunch of the M.Sc. graduates who were applying for the first call of CBU doctoral programme in November 2010. It was initiated for all interested PhD candidates who received CBU seed money as scholarship to initiate a PhD work. The money were given for two months in order to find the supervisor and agree upon the chosen topic, besides that the money were aimed to prepare research plan for future PhD research at the faculty. In my opinion the given financial was very important due the fact that CBU programme is aimed towards cross-border cooperation and for that reason the travelling abroad and meeting with supervisors from abroad, e.g. from Russia were required. In the bunch were 8 PhD students who were selected to first call of Doctoral Programme, six from them were originally from Russia, one from Poland and one from Bangladesh. The students were coming University of Eastern Finland, University of Tampere, Saint-Petersburg State Forest Technical Academy etc. Students were representing the public health, information and communication technology, international relationship and forestry and environmental engineering programmes. As a result of the preparation work we had to prepare research and study plan, also present a Power Point presentation describing the objectives and main steps of the project development. The CBU doctoral student seminar was held in Borealis building of the University of Eastern Finland on 11^th of November 2010. The students and coordinator of CBU doctoral programme agreed to undertake their studies in the graduate schools of CBU partner universities. At the seminar I presented the preliminary topic of my research related to the possibilities of applying MOTTI software in Russian conditions. This software was originally developed in Finland and used here in everyday forestry practices, however it is important to examine whereas the model is applicable to Russian conditions. Even though I stuck with that topic for a while I had to change the subject of my topic later on, I understood that it is quite common practice. The financial side of the research is important and I think that the idea to initiate seed money for PhD candidates to prepare high quality research plan and find suitable supervisor was very good idea. Besides that the call for this scholarship was publically available and was communicated through CBU central webpage, for that reason I would advise for potential PhD candidates to monitor this web resource.

Writing a Master Thesis at CBU

Hello everybody. I would like to tell you some important matters to keep in mind when writing master thesis. Normally the thesis at CBU is a final milestone which student needs to overcome in order to graduate from the studies. I started to write my Master as part of the project work in Finnish Forest Research Institute, by the way it is also quite common practice that the material from applied period is partly used for the Thesis at university.

The main topic of my study was related to analysis of transportation efficiency of forest chip export from the Republic Karelia to Finland. The title of the thesis is “The analysis of efficiency of forest chip transportation from Russian Karelia to Finland”. Low utilization of forest chips in Russian Karelia and increased demand on biofuel provides an opportunity to export the wood in form of forest chips from Russian Karelia to Finland. In my opinion the title has to reflect the main purpose of the study in one sentence. The main aims of the study have to be defined before you start with data collection, and then you start with methodology writing.

Below I would like to give an examples of main aim and some methodology description from my thesis. The field data collection was an entire part of my thesis. The qualitative and quantitative parameters of cross-border transportation were estimated during the study from different scientific sources, various companies working on cross-border transportation of forest chips. The estimation of run parameters on studied transportation route the calculation of proportion of transportation costs in overall supply costs and payloads of forest chip trucks. Besides that the analysis of quality characteristics of exported forest chips from Russian Karelia to Finland was done in Värtsilä and Lahdenpohja terminals. In addition the interviewing of drivers both in Republic of Karelia and Finland was done, only those drivers who are involved in cross-border transportation of forest chips. Obtaining of field data requires use of own car, so be prepared to use your own car or ask your friend in advance.

Writing a Master thesis in my opinion is a multidimensional study, in my case the most difficult part was to convince the truck drivers the about the importance of studies topic and relevance of their respondents. My own experience of interviewing showed that direct conversation is the best way to retrieve the most relevant information. Another difficult part of the work and probably the most important is thesis compiling, when I have collected a lot of material the next question was: what should I do with all these information? I recommend using one method and get away from laptop, somebody would call it “stone age”, however it worked for me very well: pencil and blank list of A4 paper. Then I started to draw a mind map with attempts to recall all the steps and most important of the work I have done. Of course nowadays you will find a lot of software to prepare mind maps and I am sure some of you prefer that, however I was convinced to use paper version of that.