undergrad dissertation

billyburg

i know this isn't really related to postgraduates but i would like some insight from people who have experience with dissertations etc. i'm going in to my final year of a business degree and have the choice of doing a dissertation or another module? which would have the better chance of getting a 2.1 do you think? and would the workload be more/less or the same. i enjoy working alone on essays and stuff instead of group work and presentations so i'm leaning a bit more to the dissertation? thanks for any info!

JohnMearsheimer

I had the same choice when I was in my final year but I opted to take another module instead of the dissertation. I enjoyed writing essays and I was thinking the dissertation would be good practice for a masters but seeing my friends rushing to get their dissertations done before finals made me glad I didn't take the dissertation. At the time I'd never written anything over 5000 words so in that sense writing a dissertation was a bit of an unknown which I didn't want in my final year. At least with the module I knew what to expect.

convert

If you're someone who's better at researching and writing essays rather than exams then you'd probably be better off doing a thesis. However, as JM mentioned, there's an awful lot of work involved in a thesis and you will be rushing to get it finished at the last minute, as well as trying to do work for your other courses, and study for exams.

Celtise

I was in the same position. Initially I chose to do an alternative module, however I hated it and had a window to switch back to the disseration. While throughout the year I thought it was the worst decision I ever made given it was worth 1/6 of my degree, it was my highest result at the end of final year.

My only problem with it was the utterly useless supervisor I was given. He completely ridiculed my first choice topic and told me he'd fail me if I did it and then basically ruled out all my suggestions and tried to push me in directions I was uninterested in. In the end I ignored him and did bits of research on a few topics (not too much!) before defining the topic in the middle of a presentation (go with the flow style!) and then further focus in a subsequent presentation which finally seemed to convince him I was going to let him bully me and he give me a couple of pointers and that was it.

Until two days before the due date of course, when I started writing it and researched/wrote the entire last section! So really it is not that much work but maybe a bit of stress re topics imo!