MASTER’S THESIS

In the 4^th semester, each student must work on and complete a Master thesis, which will draw upon and further specialize on subjects covered in the SMACCs programme courses. The Master thesis topics are presented to the students at the end of the first semester of courses, where all Master thesis topics are placed in a common pool upon agreement among the 4 programme Universities in collaboration with the Associated Partners. Some additional topics can nevertheless be added during the second semester, in order to include topics from industrials partners and/or proposed by the students which may come later.

All students must select their thesis topic by the 15th of April of the first academic year. Each student will choose at least 5 thesis topics, in order of preference. At least two of these five choices must concern a topic mainly supervised by the university of their second semester. The SMACCs consortium communicates the thesis topics attribution to the students by the 15^th of May of the first Academic year. In case two or more students select the same thesis topic/internship place and there is only one place available, then purely meritocratic criteria will be applied, based on student’s GPAs of the 1^st Semester.

Once the students have been assigned their thesis topic, they are allocated a thesis supervisor from one of the four programme Universities proposing the thesis topic and a co-supervisor from either one of the other three partner institutions or an Associated Partner/Research Institute/Industrial partner related with the thesis project.

At the end of their first year of studies, during the summer school taking place in July, students present a tentative research proposal for their Master thesis. This research proposal shall contain the objective of the work, research questions, methodology, the initial datasets to be used (if applicable), an outline of the thesis and a bibliography.

The thesis must be submitted in written form in English and presented orally by the student at the end of the 4^th semester. Students may adopt a theoretical or empirical approach or a combination thereof, but are encouraged to address a concrete problem related with the material taught.