Choosing a third-year project

DO's

·         Do pick your supervisor carefully. It makes a big difference to work with someone you like and can get on with. Pick someone who seems conscientious and will give you help when you need it.

·         Do give a lot of weight to the research method you will be using. This will determine how you spend your year; what your project 'feels like' to do; and what kind of hassles you will be letting yourself in for. Don't commit yourself to a year of interviewing children if what you really love is looking at MRI scans, or vice versa.

·         Do choose something that you can do rigorously. This - more than anything else - will determine the mark you get. A conclusive answer to a small question counts for much more than an inconclusive answer to a big one.

DON'Ts

·         Don't give too much weight to the topic or the research question itself, for all the reasons above. The topic may seem like the most important thing, but that can easily mislead you into doing something which is too ambitious, or which uses methods you never really feel at home with.

·         Don't try to be too 'applied'. We all want to change the world, and to solve real problems. That is a good reason to become a professional researcher, as I hope many of you will. But first you need to get a good degree, and the best way to do that is to choose a manageable problem for your project, that is one that you really can solve in six months. Ridding the world of poverty, eradicating all mental disorders, or ending international conflict are not things which fall into that category.

·         Don't call your project (which is a large piece of empirical work, usually 40 credits) a 'dissertation'. That is something quite different, and some of you may do a dissertation as well as your project. But in recent years, the final-year students in this School have started to refer to their projects as dissertations, and it causes no end of confusion.