Consequences a shift worker faces by doing shift work: comparing an 8 hour shift to a 12 hour shift

The process leading up to the acceptance of your Honours Project will be described here briefly, more detail on some of the stages appearing later in this booklet. 1. Choose a topic This is a crucial stage which can easily be underrated. If you make a bad choice at this stage you will find it much harder to complete a satisfactory final submission. At this stage, it may be possible to allocate you to a dissertation supervisor who will be able to advise you on your protocol. If not, the module coordinator will take this role. 2. Prepare a research protocol Once again, this may be seen as a mere preliminary stage before the serious work starts. In fact, much of the hard work and difficult decisions will take place during this stage. Assuming that it has been successful, your protocol will be approved by your supervisor (who will by now be allocated) and by a second marker. You can now proceed to… 3. Collect and analyse data This is when the hard work that went into the protocol will seem to be worthwhile. The important issue now is to keep within the schedule that was included within that protocol; there will be enough unforeseeable delays without inviting disaster through inadequate planning. The overall timescale for completing the dissertation will seem alarmingly short as the year progresses. 4. Complete the dissertation “Complete”, not “start”. Descriptions such as this break the overall scheme into a linear series of stages. Real life is much messier and to leave all the writing until the end is a recipe for failure. You are strongly advised to start writing sections of the final report almost as soon as the protocol is printed out. They will certainly need to be added to and revised as the project progresses but it means the initial analysis will be carried out while the data is recent, rather than reconstructed from rough notes several weeks later; this applies as much to literature reviews as to measurement and survey data. 5. Submission and assessment Within the overall plan, you will need to allow time to re-read, correct, and complete your text. References will need to be checked, illustrations inserted and tables of contents generated. The layout will need attention before the final version is printed and bound. All this takes time and the submission date is non-negotiable. After submission the supervisor and second marker will read your dissertation and independently allocate a mark. They will normally agree on the final mark.