#dissertation topic

i’m procrastinating writing my bachelor’s thesis rn- but i’m SO curious about what other people’s topics are !

This was from a paper I recently wrote about ICP-OES.

This generally explains how an ICP-OES works (Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy).

The sample is mixed with the solvent gas (Ar) in the nebulizer which was where the sample is atomized. This then goes through a spray chamber to remove big droplets. The sample then moved to the ICP torch.

A torch consists of a coolant tube, which is the outer most tube, with the highest flow rate of Ar. The Auxiliary gas tube is the middle tube, both of these flow Argon gas for the plasma. The nebuliser tube carried the sample being measured. Most ICPs use radio frequencies from around 1.1 kW to 1.4 kW to produce a magnetic field to shape the plasma. The power is transferred to the ICP using a water-cooled Copper load coil (Hill, 2006).

The ICP is coupled with an OES.

This OES is a solid-state CID chip. CID are Charge-Injection Devices which are a type of Charge-Transfer Devices (CTD). CTD fundamentally work in three steps, first photons of the desired wavelength hit a photosensitive area and are converted to photoelectrons, these then move into a ‘storage area’ where they are kept for the integration time. Once integrated, they move to an output register and a readout is produced. CIDs consist of a two-dimensional array of detectors which, coupled with an Echelle spectrometer, can analyse multiple spectra lines simultaneously over the range 170-800 nm. (Hill, 2006).

Reference:

Picking a topic and narrowing it down

I’ve been looking through the internet today, to get some good advice to help me narrow down my MA thesis topic. I wrote it down in case someone finds it helpful:

“Begin by articulating why previous discussions of an idea or research topic you’re interested in are inadequate/incomplete in some way.”

“A large overarching idea isn’t a dissertation topic, its a research agenda. A dissertation topic is some specific piece of that puzzle.”

“The only bad choice is looking for more options instead of getting to work on what’s right in front of you.”

“Consider standard texts and well-known results related to your topic. What sucked about them? Be specific. If you had to be their authors, how would you set up your research on the same problems.”

“Reacquaint yourself with the work you were doing when you were the most enthusiastic.”

“If you are prone to perfectionism, you need to rein it in, or you will not finish.”

“We may define mastery in different ways, but I do believe you need to show that you are competent at investigating a particular research topic and at undertaking theoretical or empirical work that moves our understanding of a phenomena forward.”

“In-depth case study or an application of theory to a different data set could be an original contribution.”

“Am I trying to do more cases than needed to prove the hypothesis I’m testing or answer the research questions I’ve posited?”

Sources: http://www.raulpacheco.org/2017/07/narrowing-the-research-thesis-topic/

https://ask.metafilter.com/158878/How-to-get-excited-about-picking-a-dissertation-topic

Tips to Help You to Choose a Dissertation Topic

Drafting an entire dissertation might seem difficult to a lot of people, but choosing the dissertation topics is not easy either. While the majority of the students and researchers fret over the complexity of the task, selecting the dissertation topic remains one of the major concerns for students who have to submit dissertations within a timeline.