Dissertations
During the MSc year students complete a dissertation on a topic chosen in consultation with the supervisor and Course Directors.
- Examples of past dissertations that have been highly commended by the Examiners.
- LaTeX style files, templates, and university crest.
We express our gratitude to those past students who have agreed to let us publish their work.
Some thoughts on picking a topic for a dissertation (or project report)
1. Try to use points in lectures mentioned as "research ongoing" or "unknown" as kick-off points for investigation. The people who brought up the issue can of course be regarded as potential supervisors.
2. Given your status, often working for some organization, one good place to start is to try to think of something that relates to something your employer is involved in. Whether you are in a financial institution or a consulting firm, there may be a project that due to time constraints you have not got to the bottom of mathematically and you wish to do so. A constraint on this is that there should be some mathematical substance to the project. If you have recently been doing e.g. front end development there is not a lot of scope there. But if you have been implementing some modelling numerically, perhaps under pressure to do something quickly, then a more substantial investigation of how to do it optimally, with some numerical analysis, might be a good idea. This sort of approach can be quite good as you might get a bit more latitude from your employer to spend a bit of time on it at work, which always helps.
3. Make a list of trendy issues and do a lit search on the web and elsewhere to see where research is and where it is going. Sometimes papers get published which are very mathematical and obscure in how they might be applied in practice. Sometimes quite a good dissertations can be done on a technology translation basis to make it all intelligible to practitioners and perhaps do a basic implementation in software - we have had some excellent work on this theme.
4. A list of people conducting financial research at Oxford with a selection of research areas can be found here.
Working on your dissertation
This is stating the obvious for students at your level, but PLEASE do not leave everything to the last minute. This is best done continuously over several months, and for that reason it is good to pick a topic and get working as early as possible. It should not be necessary for you to take a large block of time away from work, though a couple of days to finalize the project might be useful at the end.
The mechanics of writing a dissertation
The dissertation should not be more than fifty single spaced typed pages of A4 in a font no smaller than 10 pt (excluding appendices and figures) and must be a substantial piece of academic work.
Useful (unsupported) templates for LaTeX
It is up to you what system to write your thesis with, but the Academic Team implore you to do it in LaTeX. The quality of the output far exceeds any other system, including all mainstream word processors. You can get it for free or for a small shareware fee for any major computer environment. There is help on the Mathematical Institute web site here.
Submission
Submission is online - please see directions in the course handbook