Information about supervision of research projects for bachelor and master students

This repository contains a few documents that are meant to facilitate and streamline some parts of my supervisions of bachelor and master students. It is inspired by my supervisions to date, and thus very much not static. If you have any feedback or suggestions about it, feel free to let me know!

Supervision requests

Are you interested in doing your thesis project with me? That's great to hear, as I am often available to supervise well-prepared and motivated students on projects involving methodological, computational and applied statistics problems! Before sending me a supervision request, it may be useful for you to check out:

my personal website to get an idea of my research interests and past work.
this document that explains what to include in your supervision request;

Preparing for supervision meetings

Although showing up at a meeting and improvising may feel natural, this is usually not a good strategy to ensure that you can get the most out of a supervision meeting. Below are some tips that you can use to help making our supervision meetings more organized and effective:

make a list of the topics that you would like to discuss. This can be anything, from content-specific questions to technical problems or administrative matters;
bring your laptop so that you can access all your files when needed;
consider preparing a small PowerPoint presentation where you can include screenshots of your technical problems (for example coding problems in R), explanations of what you have been working on so far, or where you gather the results of your latest analyses;
take notes of what we discussed, so that you don't have to rely on your memory - often a lot of things are said during meetings, and it can be hard to remember all what has been said.

Writing your thesis

Writing a thesis is a process that spans over weeks or months, and it's a process that is hard to standardize. Nevertheless, here I have tried to gather some guidelines that can help make your thesis well-structured and more readable.

Technical skills

Formatting references

Please use an author-year citation stile for references in your project proposal and thesis. Check out this document for more tips and recommendations about how to manage references and bibliographies.

Exporting tables from R to LaTeX

See this example.

Finding a shared folder on OneDrive

If I shared a folder with you on OneDrive but later you can't find it anymore, try following these steps:

go to the online page of your OneDrive;
locate the menu on the left side of the page (here's a screenshot of how it should like);
click on "Shared" and check if you can see the shared folder there;
if (3) doesn't work, click on "Browse by: People". Hopefully, there you should see my name, and by clicking on it be able to retrieve the shared folder.

Using Alice

If your project involves time-consuming or memory-intensive computations, it is likely that at some point you will need to run them on a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. In that case, we will probably make use of Alice, the HPC of Leiden University. Hereafter you can find some useful links about Alice:

mirkosignorelli/info4supervisions