Tips for the bachelors degree?

Posted on 2022-09-23

Soon I will need to write my bachelors degree. I have mixed feelings about it, curious but also a bit scared. All in all, I think I have a pretty interesting topic (using low-earth-orbit satellites for routing the internet), and also have some (minor) experience in reading and writing scientific papers, but the scale of a bachelors degree is something completely new to me.

I therefore thought about what I could do to ease the progress of writing the degree, and also want your feedback on what would be sensible to do in such a situation, maybe it will help me (and maybe also others) for this and further scientific works.

Writing note when reading

This probably sound obvious to most, but it is a thing I barely do (and when I do it, I highlight many (mostly unimportant) things and put my notes directly in a text-file on my computer). I want to change it for the bachelors degree, as this is probably the progress I can improve most things.

I plan to take notes in two different stages. In the first stage, I will read the paper, take some notes that I think are interesting and mark things in the paper I do not understand, are irrelevant, or seem very important. Afterwards (and probably after a short break to clear my mind a little), I go over the notes I have written down, try to understand again what I have written down and convert it into a Zettel in my Zettelkasten, maybe leaving things out I deem unimportant after reading the whole paper, maybe going into more detail on some points. I hope that this two-stage process is better at filtering out unimportant stuff and make me re-think and remember important stuff more easily.

Zettelkasten

As previously stated, I plan to use my Zettelkasten for the notes. I think the bachelor thesis will probably be either the reason I get to love my Zettelkasten (I already do somewhat, but maybe even more later on) or hate it (I highly doubt it, but who knows).

But there are still things I am unsure about. How many Zettels per paper are sensible? One Zettel per paper with all the notes, or one Zettel just holding the basic metadata of the paper (e.g. download link, bibtex-reference) and one note for every idea I deem important from the paper (which link back to the metadata-Zettel). I think the second option would be better suited, but as I would still call myself inexperienced with the Zettelkasten, I am unsure.

Do something daily

I plan to work on the bachelor thesis daily, at least a bit per day. This hopefully forces me to at least start do something, and continuing doing work will not be that hard.

Reduce distractions

Distractions are not good. Until now, distractions were not such a big problem, as I had so much time that even with them, I was able to get my work done with much time to spare. I don't know how easy or complicated it is and how much time the bachelor thesis takes, but I would rather try to reduce my distractions then having a chance to be stressed in the end.

As something I can reduce distractions of, it is probably my YouTube usage. Even though I use my own YouTube application that does not have a doom-scrolling ability, I still have many channels I subscribe to. I plan to make a minimal subset of channels that I really want to watch regularly.

Don't panic

That one is pretty obvious. And I highly doubt that I will panic as my current grade is very good, I write the thesis for a professor I am also working at, and always finish important tasks weeks-before the schedule. Nevertheless, it is still an overall important point.

Conclusion

As you have seen, I already made some plans regarding my bachelor thesis, which will hopefully lead me to a good result in my bachelor thesis. But of course I cannot think of everything and have not yet written bigger scientific work yet, so some of you might be more experienced and would be able to tell me some more tips and improvements. I am grateful for anything that might improve the process of creating the bachelor thesis.

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