almost forgot to publish my dissertation

Now that that the dust has settled and i’ve submitted my dissertation, gotten my results etc… the time is right to get this thing online. My dissertation is 91 pages and over 18,000 words. It’s what i spent months working on. From now on, it’s completely useless to me. It’s main purpose now will be to serve as an ornament and a souvenir from my final year in college…

As with the vast majority of stuff i write, it all goes online mainly because it allows me to get feedback, debate points but most importantly protect it from ever being binned or deleted… i also know that in a few months time, final year students will be looking for ideas, just like i was last year. Some of them will chose a similar topic to mine. Some will chose different topics. If i was those guys, i’d be more than grateful if i could have a browse through my own dissertation…

photo credit: mstephens7

So for those reasons, i’ll be getting my own online tomorrow at some stage. I’ll correct the few mistakes that i’ve spotted since it was published and i’ll also remove some of the more personal / detailed info on specific businesses i’ve mentioned. I’ll refer to them as x or y just in case they feel they were being singled out. I carried out an experiment on Facebook where i contacted 10 businesses through their facebook page, some replied, some didn’t. For the purpose of showing how and where i got my results from, all names were left in, however if i’m putting this online i don’t think it serves any purpose to leave names… so that’s why i’ll be editing stuff like that before it goes up.

I’ve no doubt it can also be picked apart by people too… it was good enough for 73% (combined with my presentation) so that doesn’t mean it’s flawless. If people can tell me where i’ve gone wrong, great… i welcome it.

The main purpose of this though is to let other students see what a dissertation looks like… like i said, this got 73%, so future students now have some kind of a benchmark. Although some lecturers did show us some previous dissertations, this should all be public, in my humble opinion. If i wanted to see dissertations from previous years, i couldn’t. The library collection only went up to about 2005 for my particular course and communication between computing department & library was put down as the reason why we couldn’t see more up to date dissertations. I prefer to bypass both myself, which is why this will go up online tomorrow 🙂