Supervision of empirical theses
A lot of students favor an empirical Bachelor or Master´s thesis because it includes, besides the review of literature and a theoretical part, also an empirical part. However, the realization of an empirical work is often more extensive than a merely theoretical one as it comes along with additional tasks. These tasks can be the implementation and realization of a survey or the cooperation with a company or research institute in order to obtain secondary data. Therefore, careful time planning and the formulation of clear hypotheses are inherent. The formulation of clear hypotheses and goals is often not trivial, because the company’s and the supervisor’s expectations often don’t match. To rule out negative surprises, the coordination of the two parties should be cleared in advance.
Not every company’s based project is suited for writing an academic empirical thesis. When writing a company based thesis fu:stat can help trying to identify academically relevant projects. Fu:stat only supervises projects, if its focus lies on the application of statistical methods. A (payed) internship prior to the empirical thesis is possible. In case of the implementation of an empirical thesis a contract between fu:stat and the company is concluded which states the responsibilities of both parties. The contract also includes potential financial compensation for additional efforts (e.g. traveling expenses).