Within this course, students will write their master thesis.
They will have to perform certain tasks like

• submitting a proposal and discussing it with the course instructors
• doing an interim presetation and
• presenting the main findings of their theses to the course instructors and their colleagues.

After completing the course students will be able to:

• define a research question after having identified a specific problem
• independently perform a scientific problem solving process
• adopt quantitative methods to the research question 
• evaluate, to interpret and to discuss relevant datasets 
• give an overview of actual scientific knowledge on the area of research.

Furthermore, after completing the course students will be able to:

• organize and to structure information and their own ideas
• integrate the information obtained before into a coherent approach
• breakdown a global problem into partial steps and milestones and to work on it according to a project schedule
• enhance knowledge and information according to a specific target group.
• gather, to assess and to critically summerize the relevant literature
• get to know basic methods of scientific work and to adopt it on the research question chosen appropriate to the level of a master thesis
  

Specific attendance rules apply for the final presentations and will be communicated together with the final schedule of these presentations.

• Preliminary discussion (in the fall term)
• Individual meetings with students (fall term; details scheduled to be distributed before)
• Final presentations (at the end of the spring term)

Assessment will be based upon:

• Quality of submitted presentation slides (20%)
• Proposal presentation (40%)
• Final presentation (40%)

kurt.hornik@wu.ac.at, rainer.jankowitsch@wu.ac.at, stefan.pichler@wu.ac.at