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Faculty management: Master's thesis students must have a supervisor from their own faculties

It is according to the rules. But it is also to ensure that proper assistance is provided. Management at the Faculty of Science responds to two master's thesis students who have had their cross-faculty thesis rejected.

We have read your comment and can understand your frustration.

It is an option for students from the Faculty of Science to write their theses at other faculties and universities. The only requirement is that the thesis student has a supervisor from the Faculty of Science.

We are pleased to see that in this case this solution has indeed worked, as it gives students the opportunity to choose interesting topics across faculty boundaries and with other relevant universities.

The fact that the student also has to have a supervisor from the Faculty of Science is not due to the prospect of the faculty otherwise losing financial income. Government funding for master’s thesis students writing their thesis outside the Faculty of Science in 2020 only amounted to DKK 1.6 million out of a DKK 3 billion total budget.

It is due to the fact that the Faculty of Science must be able to follow and be involved with the thesis in order to ensure that all academic and formal requirements are met. A thesis can make up half of a master’s degree programme, so everything has to be in order.

Less assistance without an affiliation

This is at the same time due to a consideration of the students’ rights. As a faculty, we are much less able to help if challenges arise during the thesis if the student is no longer affiliated to the faculty.

In some degree programmes, however, it is possible to write master’s thesis at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. This is the case for cross-faculty study programmes like molecular biomedicine, where the two faculties have made an agreement that lets students write their master’s thesis exclusively with a supervisor from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences without having to apply for it.

Apart from this, there are a few other programmes where the Board of Studies has specifically decided that it is possible to write theses at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. These cases are stated in the curriculum.

READ ALSO: Our master’s theses have been bogged down with bureaucracy and hassle

Regrets long processing time

It is true that there has been a change in our practice in this area. This was after academics at the Faculty of Science called for clearer guidelines so that the boards of studies could better make decisions in cases where students apply for credit-transfer.

We have therefore been discussing the practices of the Faculty of Science’s six study boards for quite some time, and have now reached a more uniform processing practice for the applications. The Faculty of Science’s current guidelines are very similar to, for example, Aarhus University and the Technical University of Denmark.

We are sorry that the processing of your specific case has taken such a long time. But it’s a complicated matter, and it’s been important to us that we discuss it thoroughly in-house.

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