When drafting your thesis:

Step 1 is to implement your advisors’ initial recommendations. After doing so, you should

• Meet with your advisor again and present the changes.
• Get your advisor’s permission to start collecting data.
• And, if necessary, deal with the topic change form.

Step 2 is to collect the data.

• You are discouraged to skip directly from proposal to data collection, as your advisor may make improvement suggestions that could invalidate your collected data.
• It is also probable that recommended literature by your advisor could lead to changes in your method.
• Once you have implemented the suggestions of your advisor and with his approval, you can now start collecting and coding your data.

Step 3 focuses on data cleaning and analysis. Depending on your data, this involves:

• Evaluate your data for issues such as validity, outliers, and ensuring a normal curve. (You will learn more about this in the Market Research, Quantitative Research Methods for Thesis Research class, and Statistics classes.)
• For qualitative interview data, this involves cleaning up and coding responses.
• Then comes analyses. Conduct relevant statistical tests and put the results in a table, chart, or another relevant format.
• Finally, interpret the results. What does it mean? During this phase, it is important to link the results back to the research questions/hypotheses and explain how it links to the literature. Did the findings support what others have argued, found, or proposed? Or does it differ? What does this mean? What are the theoretical and practical implications?

Step 4 after completing the data analysis and reporting the results, provide the completed work to your advisor and:

• Provide your advisor with a copy of your completed project.
• Allow your advisor to digest the information. *This depends on the advisor’s availability.
• When meeting, be prepared to introduce your findings and interpretations and to answer any questions the advisor may have.

Step 5 is all about implementing final suggestions and editing your thesis for quality and academic appropriateness. In line with NTU library requirements, a completed thesis should be arranged thus:

1. Title Page
2. Thesis Oral Defense Committee Certification
3. Acknowledgment and/or Dedication (optional)
4. Abstract
5. Table of Contents
6. List of Illustrations
7. List of Figures, Tables
8. Main Text*
9. References
10. Appendices

*It is important to be aware that the exact headings and subheadings under the main text section depend in large part upon the kind of project that you are writing and the suggestions made by your advisor. The following table gives some guidance on potential headings:

• https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_style_introduction.html
• https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_style_introduction.html