Bachelor Thesis Log 16

October 19th, 2010

Welcome back to the sixteenth report on my bachelor thesis. Today I will be comparatively brief again. I'll tell you something about the results of the feedback phase (or rather: the absence of results) and about the second time I gave my presentation.

Getting Feedback

It's always great to get constructive feedback on your own work. In the past, like many others, I was often rather unreceptive to criticism about my projects. That has changed recently, and I'm happy about every suggestion for improvement. At the same time, it's becoming noticeable that it's not that easy to get feedback. On the contrary, I constantly ask for feedback and only very rarely get usable information. Unfortunately, this is also the case with my bachelor thesis.

I wrote to a good number of people asking for feedback on a preliminary version of my thesis. One person responded in writing and two verbally. The result for me was the correction of a single grammar error as well as the acknowledgement of the fuzzy impression of a reader that the text was altogether too short (“for a bachelor thesis,” seemed to be the unspoken addition). There were no comments on the content.

So I got less out of it than I had hoped. At least it turned out to be the right decision not to wait with the feedback from Axel until now. By the way, it'll take until Friday before I get it – he's probably already read the thesis, but he can't schedule a meeting until Friday. It is the beginning of the lecture period, which is certainly no less stressful for a busy lecturer than for me – accordingly, I don't want to hold that against him at all. Nevertheless, it makes me doubt the vision of an iterative approach with short feedback cycles. At the moment, I have no idea what will come out of the meeting on Friday and whether I will have to write a lot in the next weeks. Honestly, I hope it will be limited, since I have a whole bunch of course presentations to prepare this semester (I'm counting five in total right now). We'll see.

Result Report: Round 2

I can't go to the SWT Oberseminar all the time this semester because of conflicting events, but nevertheless I will give my talk there again in a more detailed form on November 2nd. For those who missed the first one and would like to hear it: this will probably be the last chance.

The Oberseminar will take place on Tuesdays at 4 pm in D-220 at the Informatikum. I would be very happy about numerous visitors this time as well!

Future

Next Tuesday I will – finally – get to post the feedback result from Axel for you to read here. I know, I've been promising it for weeks. But I don't see how it could go wrong this time. Further planning will be based on the type and extent of the feedback. So see you then!