I’ve been supporting distance-learning students for over ten years as module lead for students completing research projects and writing up their Masters dissertations. The students are people well embedded in a career track in health care; research nurses, pharmacists, trial managers, doctors in their specialty training etc. As you can imagine they are an impressive bunch of people who are robust, adaptable and well used to the rigours of “further training”, yet for many they share a common concern… the pirate ship looming over the horizon that is…. The Masters Dissertation.

So what is it that makes this particular element of a masters degree such a source of anxiety…? Here is a sample of the collected concerns from the last decade, with comments:

I’ve never done any real research…. Are you sure? Most folk have to identify unknowns about their patients or work tasks on a daily basis. They use agreed or standard methods, apply standards to make decisions and have to relate the new facts to a wider experience in order to use the new information. That is the scientific process and for most healthcare workers it is also… the day job…!!!… they just didn’t realise it. The simple way to check that an individual can demonstrate that they understand the whole scientific process is to do the process from beginning to end… that’s why doing a research project figures so strongly in Masters degrees worldwide.

I don’t really understand all the IT stuff.  Me neither… we have geeks who do it for us… they give us how-to sheets that we follow… that you can also use (or ask your kids, or anyone under 19 yrs)…. We also have great IT support who are used to daft questions… even mine…

The regular modules are fine, but the dissertation seems scary. That is because in a knowledge-based module with an exam at the end you can hide-in-the-crowd to a certain extent, whereas a research project is individual and one-to-one with a supervisor or mentor. But one-to-one is a plus, you deal solely with YOUR issues/concerns/thoughts.

The writing scares me. That’s because you did science at school, science at University and you haven’t had to write a document bigger than a thank-you letter for 15 years…. This is common in folk on a science or healthcare career track but its not that you can’t, you just never got the practice… so here’s the opportunity… and its easier as its on a topic you know well…. and you even get help and support in “how-to-write”.

I don’t really understand stats. Q: did you play cards for pennies at University… ?…then yes you DO understand stats.. for the formal stuff we have great little modules in the courses and one-to-one support for “working” your own dataset.

It all seems a bit daunting. Aha..!… the crux issue. We are all good at working the day job, but the reality is that we are rarely the sole arbiter of what the bigger plan is that we contribute to… for a Masters dissertation you are the ring-master… you decide what advice to follow and what to ignore and to ensure that all the components come together, from study design to governance applications, from data accrual to doing the stats…. but it’s a learning curve with support, not a chucked-in-the-deep-end process. The module staff  help and guide you in this bigger process of project management and final assembly, just like the teachers did for the individual component subjects… its just another skill after all.

This capacity of being responsible for the whole plan is the quality that employers/appointment boards are expecting when they see someone has a Masters degree, which is why you see it so widely as a necessary qualification for senior staff, team leaders, senior administrators and those wanting the gateway to higher qualifications.

We all have holes in our skills set; things we didn’t master first time or wish we were better at, and much of the anxiety concerning a masters dissertation seems to centre on our own personal gaps… so a Masters dissertation is an effective way to plug the gaps as part of professional development…. just not what you were expecting when you thought you’d like a gap year. (?).

Dr Pete Middleton.

Module Lead Dissertation Module.

Oncology and Palliative Care Masters programme.

Clinical Research Masters Programme.