I’m struggling man. I’m doing an online masters program in software engineering and simply cannot come up with a thesis idea. Being away from campus and with a full-time job doesn’t put you in the academic environment that is conducive to research. I feel like a know a little about a lot (databases, modeling, simulation, embedded applications, autocode tools in safety critical embedded applications, etc). But at this point not really enough to delve terribly deep enough for a masters degree. I’ve kept hoping an idea would just come to me as I’m now about 2/3 done with the program, but it hasn’t.
I could graduate about this time next year if I could just find a topic. I’m currently searching research papers on various topics but nothing is coming to me. I’m interested in autocode generation tools in safety-critical embedded systems but what can I do with that? What can I add to tools like Matlab Real Time Workshop? What can I add that the world would be interested in?
Anyone else struggled with coming up with an idea? I would love to find a topic so I can finally wrap this degree up.
Find an instructor and ask for ideas. Seriously. Go to the faculty list and look for someone who is in your area and would also be easy to work with (good metric: someone who has supervised MS students in your program before). Read a few of their papers, then email and say you found A and B very interesting and would they want to talk about supervising an MS thesis. You can say that you have some rough topic ideas but you’d be really excited to hear about problems they’ve been thinking about recently. Dollars to donuts they won’t even ask you to suggest a topic, if they want to work with you they’ll give you a list of topics (which may only have one item on it). Which is better at this point, IMHO, it will be easier and more interesting to work on something that your advisor already wants to invest their time on, even if it’s not something you came up with on your own initially.
If you’re not sure who is a good person to ask then make an appointment with your program or academic advisor – I assume there is some faculty member in charge of you or your program? This is what they’re there for, and they know the other faculty so they’ll have some idea of who has the time and interest to supervise an MS thesis.
I agree. Professors are often working on a research contract with lots of deliverables. MS students represent free labor.
My superpower is coming up with more research ideas than I can possibly work on. I bug my daughter, who is in a Ph.D. program, by coming up with some in her area. But though I’m a CS person my Ph.D. is 30 years old, and I’m in a very different area now - and I don’t know anything about prior work in the areas you talked about.