lessons from my thesis

What I learned from writing my thesis

As I underwent my master's degree in IT, I was required to commit 2 units over the course of 2 semesters, into theorizing, experimenting, and writing my thesis, and while it was an arduous task, I learned plenty of skills that I was previously blind to. Therefore, in this blog, I will be sharing some of the lessons I found that I am certain, will help me in the workplace.

Communicate

Prior to my thesis, I always told myself to do everything on my own, and that if I arrived on a dead end, to figure it out myself. However, the issues I encountered on my thesis, both technical problems, and mental and physical problems, convinced me otherwise, and so, I forced myself to break this personal rule of mine, and communicated with my thesis supervisor, and fellow students that are working on similar projects.

The result went as well as you would expect, I got help from both my supervisor and friends, my writing became better than ever, and I was able to even balance my work and life experience better. Overall, it was a lesson I will carry with me towards the future.

Be Creative

This refers to the many things you do to reach your target, most of the time, the first solutions you come up with to solve a problem, may not work, and when you've tried everything you've been taught, what do you do? You think outside the box, and make solutions of your own.

This was a problem that I can proudly say, I learned to solve on my own. The ability to adapt to different problems, was definitely a skill that I was missing, and my thesis showed me that, I relied on my studies way too much, studies that would not be able to be used in different problems.

Therefore, I learned how to create my own solutions, be creative, and in the end, the work flow of my thesis improved significantly, when I stopped looking for solutions from the power point lectures I've been given in class.

Accept Bad Results

In my case, I had to juggle results which came from coding, which meant that results often show errors, or results that are simply impossible. What I didn't know, was how common this was in our line of work, fortunately, communication with my supervisor made me realize that.

What he didn't tell me however, was that I had to accept bad results for what it is, and learn from it, both metaphorically, and literally. Metaphorically, refers how I shouldn't be upset from getting bad results, otherwise, it can and will bring you down mentally. Literally, in the sense that, when your lines of code didn't work, don't worry, there is always a solution if you look hard enough, so don't throw those old lines of code away, and instead, improve upon them.

Overall, these 3 lessons, remain clear to me to this day, and will likely stay so for a long time.