Master's thesis

Students of the degree programmes in Industrial Engineering and Management, Business Information Systems and Media Management can select topics for Master's theses from the regularly updated list of topics for Master's theses of the group or inform themselves in a personal conversation with the academic staff of the group about research topics on which Master's theses can be written. Students also have the opportunity to submit their own suggestions for topics for Master's theses.

The exact topic, the specific requirements and the deadlines for the work are determined by the head of the group in consultation with the respective supervisor.

After consultation with the potential supervisor of the Master's thesis, an exposé for the chosen topic has to be prepared. The exposé is a forward-looking form of content specification and should contain the following points:

• motivation, objective, guiding questions,
• rough outline and structure of the thesis (description of the rough outline),
• brief assignment of the topic to the degree program (establish a link to modules/courses),
• essential literature references.

The period until the submission of the first version of the synopsis to the supervisor should not exceed 4 weeks. There should be a maximum of 2 weeks between the feedback on the first version and the submission of the final exposé.

If the exposé is positively evaluated in the subject area, the application for the issue of a Master's thesis topic (registration at the examination office) can be filled out.

After confirmation of the admission requirements for the Master's thesis by the examination office, please hand in the application form to your supervisor. After the form has been signed by the head of the group and the respective examination board chairperson, the Master's thesis topic is officially assigned and the processing period begins.

You can now write your Master's thesis. The length of a Master's thesis should generally be 60 to 70 pages. Please note that the number of pages may only be exceeded in justified cases that have been expressly approved by the supervisor (e.g. empirical work).

For information on the structure of the Master's thesis, please refer to the guidelines for writing scientific theses at the group of Sustainable Production Management and Logistics.

Participation in an interim presentation is obligatory for every Master's student after three months at the latest. This gives each Master's student the opportunity to present the status of her/his work and receive feedback from the auditorium (subject area, fellow students).

For each thesis, an abstract (in German) of a maximum of 2,400 characters and an English abstract of approximately the same length must be prepared. This page is to be included at the end of the thesis.

Before submitting your thesis, please enter the bibliographic data (including abstract and summary) of your thesis into the web form on the HSB Notification of a Thesis page of the University Library.

Please note the following for the fields:

• The thesis is subject to the obligation of secrecy
  → no, unless otherwise agreed with the supervisor
• Date of defence/assessment
  → Date on which you receive the assessment email from your supervisor.
• Day of the last examination (date)
  → corresponds to the day of the defence/assessment
• Supervisor
  → Always enter the name of the supervising university lecturer "Prof. Dr. Rainer Souren" here.
• Second examiner
  → the name of the supervising academic staff member must be entered here. In the case of a thesis supervised directly by Prof. Souren, please ask who is acting as second referee for the paper.

The German-language abstract and an English-language abstract (= translation of the abstract) are submitted to the library for the purpose of publication, cf. § 25 (8) PO-AB for degree programmes "Bachelor" and "Master". The student is responsible for the content and form of the summaries (German and English) as the author of the thesis.

When handing in the thesis, in addition to the three hard-bound copies, a CD of the thesis (Adobe PDF or MS Word files) and the autoresponse mail (registration of a thesis) from the university bibliography must be handed in. If online sources are cited in the thesis, the corresponding source files with exact source reference and retrieval date must be attached to the CD. Please ensure that the signed declaration on honour is included in all three copies of the thesis.

First and second examiners read through the Master's thesis, evaluate it and write their reviews. Information about the grading as well as copies of the reviews will be sent to you after completion of the assessment process.

Parallel to the thesis assessment process, a disputation of the thesis takes place, which is taken into account in the grading. Experience shows that it takes about 4 to 6 weeks after submission until you receive your grade.

After the grade has been announced, you have the opportunity to make an appointment for individual feedback in the office hours.

After submitting the German abstract and the English abstract via the web form, you will receive a confirmation e-mail from the University Library. Please hand this in to the Examinations Office together with the completed Deregistration form from the Departement of Economic Sciences and Media and the application for exmatriculation. Only then you can be properly exmatriculated.

For questions regarding the university bibliography, please contact:

bibliographie.ub@tu-ilmenau.de
http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/ub/