Choosing a Topic and a Supervisor

The first step is to write a Master's Thesis on a topic relevant to the MSc program, under the supervision of a professor. You may choose any instructor who teaches a course within the MSc program to be your supervisor.

To help you find a suitable match, you can search for each Unifi professor in the Unifi directory to review their personal pages and research interests. A professor's research interests give insights about the possible topics of a thesis supervised by the professor.

Thesis Requirements and Workload

You and your supervisor will jointly determine the topic of your thesis and decide whether the analysis will be theoretical, or empirical, or both. Your thesis must demonstrate your ability to analyze relevant issues using appropriate methods in a scientifically rigorous way, and it must include original contributions.

There is no standard about the page lenght or the time required to complete the thesis, but a rough estimate is obtained by noticing that the final exam carries 21 ECTS, that is 70% of a standard semester's workload (30 ECTS). Your supervisor will ultimately determine when your thesis is complete and ready to be presented and defended (Step 2).

Tools and Resources for Writing

• Bibliographic Research The Unifi libraries offer personalized assistance for bibliographic searches.
• Specialized Software Unifi provides free access to specialized software that may be useful in writing a thesis.
• LaTeX If your thesis involves mathematical notation, then the typesetting system LaTeX may be useful to you: Please find a LaTeX guide and the page of a users group. LaTeX may be also used through the online LaTeX editor called Overleaf; a LaTeX template is available here.
• Cover Page The School of Economics and Management suggests this template for the thesis' cover page.