After you have handed in your thesis at the examination office, you should make an appointment for the thesis seminar (usually every Tuesday between 2 and 4 p.m.) at the secretary's office. During the seminar you should present your thesis in 20 minutes (no longer!) - what was the question, how did you work on the problem, what are the results and how do you assess them? Afterwards there will be about 10 to 15 minutes of questions.

The following also applies to the bachelor thesis: quality instead of quantity. Efficient does not necessarily mean to write as little as possible, it means to include only important and meaningful things in the thesis. Basics without direct reference to the task, long protocol-like reports of experiments, etc. are out of place here. A frequent phenomenon: especially work or research that is particularly time-consuming, one would like to "dignify" with corresponding text passages regardless of whether they are important in this length or not. This is exactly what you do not understand by efficiency!

You will receive a layout template from your supervising WM.

Especially important for a very good bachelor/master thesis is the correct handling of sources. In the bibliography, all sources that you have used, including those of the images, must be listed. You can read about how to do this for different works, for example, at www.webwort.de/pro/richtigzitieren.pdf. It is especially important that you cite consistently and that the reader can find the corresponding work with the help of your information.

Your supervising WM will give you hints on the citation style.CD or USB-Stick

It should be noted that in the future, no embargoes or other rules of confidentiality beyond the usual duties of confidentiality and due diligence will be accepted on final papers (Faculty Council resolution of April 6, 2016).

The evaluation of your thesis is the responsibility of the university, i.e. your supervising research assistant and Prof. Müller. If you have written your thesis externally, your company's supervisor will make a grade suggestion. We will take this into account, but it is not binding.

Sources from the Internet often have the unattractive characteristic of no longer being available after a few years, because pages are restructured or content is deleted. If you refer to an internet source, please proceed as follows:

 - in the bibliography give the concrete link as well as the day of the access
 - insert a pdf of the "printed" internet page on the CD/USB stick

The CD/USB stick that must accompany your thesis upon submission should contain the following:

 - Bachelor's thesis/Master's thesis as Word and PDF file (Latex documents if applicable).
 - Abstract extra as PDF file
 - Pictures of the thesis with title (according to the picture title in the thesis)
 - PDF files of the internet sources (i.e. "print" the internet page where you found the information as a pdf and hand in the file as well)
 - Simulation, construction files or scripts that were created in the course of your work

An extension is possible in principle, but it must be approved by the supervisor and the examiner. This usually only happens if unforeseen circumstances have not allowed you to write your thesis as planned, e.g. delays in experiments due to technical defects or temporarily unavailable licenses for simulations.

At the beginning of each paper there is a motivation, a thesis, a need to investigate exactly this topic in more detail. Your task is not to "work through" a given problem, but to think about it yourself, for example:

• How does the problem fit into the overall context?
• What are the expectations with regard to the solution (thesis?)?
• What is or would be the benefit of the solution (e.g., increase in safety, simplification of a process, creation of a new policy)?
• How has the problem been solved so far and why is there a need for improvement at all?
• What further developments does this make possible?

In tasks in which simulation is used, the time that has to be planned for the individual work steps is often underestimated.

1. Before the simulation, assumptions for simplifications must be made - these abstractions must also be justified! Only if you are clear about what you omit or simplify and why, you will be able to evaluate your results correctly later.
2. During the simulation you might be surprised how long a single simulation can take - depending on the program and its scope it can take from a few minutes to several hours.
3. After the simulation you have to evaluate and critically (!) question your results. With a simulation you can imitate reality with a certain abstraction, to what extent a realistic calculation was possible - this depends to a large extent on your specifications and simplifications. Here a high degree of distance is required: what can your model do, what can it not do, what do improvements look like?

The last part of the work, the discussion of the results, is also one of the most important. Here you should show above all that you can correctly assess your results and evaluate them with a critical distance. It is helpful to always look back at the motivation of your work: could a thesis be proven? With which limitations can your results be applied? Do further investigations have to be done? What unforeseen difficulties were encountered? What points should someone who wants to use your results further pay attention to in order not to draw wrong conclusions? - The quality of your work depends to a large extent on the answers to these and similar questions. Even an otherwise very good and comprehensive paper loses value if the results are not put into the right context and evaluated appropriately.

Work with a focus on testing includes both investigations on and with test vehicles (e.g. vehicle dynamics, alternative drives) but also tests on the crash facility (vehicle safety) and on test benches (e.g. engine technology).

The same applies here as with simulation: the experiment itself usually makes up the smallest part of the work. The core of your scientific work here is to work out

• which experiment
• for which purpose
• with which means
• with which simplifications
• under consideration of which boundary conditions

should be carried out. Assumptions must always be justified (also with sources). After planning, you should carry out the experiment on your own as far as possible. Afterwards, the results must be critically examined so that it becomes clear: with which restrictions are your conclusions applicable? How can the results be applied with regard to the previously posed thesis? Where are possible sources of error and how can these be quantified? What further experiments might have to be carried out?

A literature search is used to get an overview of the current state of the art, to find out which studies have already been carried out on one's own task and what results they have produced. It is also always necessary, for example, when simplifications have to be made and justified in experiments or simulations, or when assumptions have to be statistically substantiated (e.g. in statements on the occurrence of accidents).

For this purpose, it is necessary not only to read up on the Internet or in standard works, but also to find the specialist publications on the subject. It is helpful here, for example, to search for conferences on one's own problem, where one can find suitable publications. In the bibliography of each good article you will find further works that allow you to deepen your knowledge of the subject matter.

If you think that literature research is something you do "on the side", you are wrong! Reading up on the specialist world is an important building block for being able to assess one's own problem from several angles and to draw the right conclusions. Therefore, the quality of the research in the bachelor thesis is highly valued.

Here, it is not primarily the independent processing of the task that is meant, but the independent thinking and development of solutions. With your work, you should show that you can apply the specialist knowledge you have acquired so far to a specific topic, examine it from different perspectives and correctly evaluate the results you have achieved.