The Master's thesis (TFM) aims to carry out an individual work under the direction of an academic tutor.
The student must carry out an original research project in which she/he applies or develops the knowledge and competences acquired during the Master.
The student will write a report reflecting the work done and will defend the results obtained during the master's thesis in front of a committee
Description of contents:
- Presentation of work topics.
- Compilation and analysis of information related to the Master's Thesis.
- Development of the Master's Thesis.
- Preparation of the report and defense of the Master's Thesis.
The coordinator of the TFM is in charge of searching for project offers and communicate them to the students throughout the web of the TFM course. The students value them apply for those in which they are interested. To that end, students must send a CV and a motivation letter that are re-submitted to the responsible of those offers. A personal interview is the most common step to finally select an appropriate student for each offer.
All students are assigned a director of the TFM, and when the TFM is carried out outside UC3M, tstudents will also have an academic tutor, who is a PhD from the department of the Master. In all cases, the tutors will have the necessary qualifications to guide and follow the student¿s project, as well as to evaluate their performance. In this way, the acquisition of the stablished learning results is guaranteed.
The coordinator of the TFM encourages the communication with the students, teachers and departments and supervises the correct planning and implementation of the projects by the students including the proposal presentation, the development and the final public defense.
According to the learning results, there are two TFM modalities: a research project or an innovation project. In each case, the structure of the report is explained below:
1) Research project: the structure of the report must include an abstract, introduction, goals and hypothesis, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusions and bibliography.
Since almost a third of the ECTS in the Master are related to economy and business, the project must have a specific section about the socio-economic aspects As an example, some of these aspects can be (*):
a) Legal and social framework
b) Identification of the problem, business opportunity and time to market.
c) Public market size; customers, major competitors, stakeholders and target audience.
d) Economic needs related to the degree of maturity of the technology, or the creation of the company, and ways to solve these needs.
e) How will the entities involved be affected economically by potential savings or improved incomes?
f) Viability of the commercialization of the results, and ways to do it. If it involves a topic that requires research, design a collaborative research strategy, or a transfer to a hospital or biomedical/biotechnological industry, indicating the expected biomedical impact of the results. If the technological or scientific topic is mature enough but not commercially exploited yet, design a strategy for its market launch.
g) Possibility and viability of creating a company from the results
h) Partners and strategic alliances
(*) Depending on the scope of the Project, different extent and combination of these examples will be required.
2) Innovation project. The structure of the report should cover all the sections that reasonably support the opportunity and viability of their creation, including at least the following points: opportunity and value proposition, state of the art, business idea (generation and viability analysis), strategic analysis and competitive advantages, marketing plan, production plan, organization plan, human resources plan, legal-fiscal plan as well as economic and financial plan.
Other proposals different from the creation of a company, as for example, launching new lines or new market products, will reasonably adapt its content in the terms of the scope of each section.
