Dissertation Meeting

30/05/2024

Agenda

• General Information
• Timeline
• Supervision General Tips
• Assessment
• Reference Documents
• Integrity Issues (Rudolf Tange)
• Q&A

Projects have been allocated and communicated in May 2024

• Allocation shared with students on Minerva.
• Allocation shared with Supervisors on Teams/ via e-mail
   

What happens next?

• Students were advised to be in contact with the supervisors to introduce themselves.

• If you have not done, please email your supervisors asap to start arrangements.

• If supervisors are unresponsive (ie not replying by mid next week), please email me promptly.

Supervision: General Info

• Dissertation work starts in early June, after students' last exam.
• Student to contact supervisor(s) before June to arrange an informal meeting (not included in the official supervision meeting hours).
• Student and supervisor(s) should arrange 6 hours of meetings (modalities to be agreed) - do this as soon as possible.
• Consecutive meetings should not be more than 2 weeks apart (with flexibility)
• Supervisor should monitor students progress.
• Students are expected to be on campus during their dissertation work (see Useful Contacts SES/VISA)

Supervision: General Info

• First 3-4 meetings in a group (if applicable)
• At least 3 meetings before mid July
• Dissertation drafted by mid August
• Not proof read but general sanity check

Group meetings

meetings can be 1-2-1 or group meetings if many students have been assigned your project.

• Group meetings are efficient and encourage students to share and discuss. It usually speeds up the progress and creates healthy competition dynamic.
• Make sure to have individual final output (eg. by focussing on specific aspects of the topic).
• Usually 3- 4 groups meeting and 2-3 final individual ones to address specific issues (this works well, flexible).

Dissertation feedback before submission

• If students provides the supervisor with a draft of the dissertation at least 3 weeks before the deadline (and anyway within supervisors agreed timeline), the should receive general feedback (not line by line) before their final submission. 
• The expectation is that students only receive feedback on the dissertation draft once.

Good Practice

Suggestions:

• Share a short report with supervisor(s) ~2 days ahead of every meeting so that you can comment on their progress and give guidance more effectively.
• Practice on using latex with the provided template on Minerva. A very good online tool is overleaf.
• Create a project on GitHub to share with your supervisor(s). (ABC for a Data Scientist!).
• Learn how to use GitHub. Very good tutorials here: Atalassian and Software Carpentries.

DSA Timeline & details

Sta./Appl.Fin. Timeline & details

Assessment 

Poster Session MATH5872 (DSA)

• Mixed sessions of ~ 2h with a variety of topics

• 5 min individual poster presentation + up to 10 min Q&A per student ( about 2 hours per session)

• Each student asks a question and gives feedback to their group posters 

• Lead Assessor + Second Assessor

• Sessions allocated by the project manager

• Assessors mark independently

• At the end of the session, the assessor will merge their marks and comments.

• individual feedback forms will be sent to the students

Poster MATH5872 (DSA)- Marking Scheme - 10% of the final overall dissertation mark

Dissertation Assessment DSA

MATH5872 (DSA) Form

Text

Dissertation Stat./App. Fin.

 MATH5871 Form

Handbooks

MATH5872: https://minerva.leeds.ac.uk/ultra/courses/_551438_1/outline/file/_11881894_1

MATH5871: https://minerva.leeds.ac.uk/ultra/courses/_549032_1/outline/file/_11881897_1

On Minerva MATH5871/2 Module page,

under Learning resources: preparing for your dissertation.

Useful Contacts

Student Visa Advice:

studentvisaadvice@leeds.ac.uk

Maths Students Support Team: mathsstudentsupport@leeds.ac.uk

Libray Contacts

Suzy Beck: s.e.beck@leeds.ac.uk

Anija Komatar: a.komatar@leeds.ac.uk

In July here will be a drop-in session about how to write your dissertation organized by the library

Integrity Issues

Dr Rudolf Tange

Any Questions?