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.