Learnings from Masters Thesis

I just gave my Masters thesis presentation a week back and think its a good time to record my experience, in case I decide to pursue higher studies.

1. Literature review: Its like a chicken and egg problem. Unless you do literature review you don't know what is out there and what needs improvement. But unless you choose a topic how do you do the literature review. So my advice is to pick an area and read the basic few papers. See what interests you and then use google scholar to find related papers. Look for which other papers referenced the papers you have already read. Always keep copy of the papers you read and maintain a summary. Keep adding them to your reference library. Be prepared to be surprised. While writing my final paper I came across an article published 3 years ago with the exact same work as mine. That added another month to my work (and delayed my graduation by a semester) as now I had to extend my work beyond what I had already done.
   
2. Research Topic: Don't worry to much about the research topic. Being flexible is the key. Do decide on a title but its not written in stone until its published. So don't worry, let the research take its course.
   
3. Documentation: This is very important specially if there is various different codes and datasets. Keep track of naming conventions. Give meaningful names.
   
4. Backups: Take regular backups. If possible sign up for a online backup service (like mozy) and point them to your important files and folders. Take a full backup after anything significant happens, like sending your file for review. You might have the actual file in the email, but if the file is not self contained (like LaTeX files) having a copy of the supporting file is a good idea. Memory is cheap now a days.
   
5. Presentation: Keep a separate power point file or word document where to record any significant ideas, graphs, links, commands, references, change of course etc. For important plots save the editable graphs, as some annotation or label change etc. might be needed if its decided to include it in the final report.