vendredi 27 février 2015

Problems with Bachelor's thesis supervisor


I need your help and opinions about my experience. This year is the final year of my bachelor studies, so I have to finish my bachelor's thesis.


I wanted to start with it as soon as possible, so I contacted my supervisor last year in May already. He appeared very enthusiastic about it and he offered me a little different topic than I've chosen from the list. His one was much more challenging, uncommon and interesting. I got basically my own little research about efficiency of computer parallel systems etc. It's mainly concerned with the software project which is being developed at our university.


I've worked really hard the whole last summer(during holidays), I got a job in industry and I've practically completed approximately 2/3 of my thesis practical part. All this time I was trying to contact him and consult my results. But he simply wasn't answering my e-mails, phone calls etc. After 3 months I went to his office personally (still during holidays) and I said him I want to consult my thesis. He briefly looked at my program running, refused to look at the code and told me, that it's ok, but not what he wants. Than he gave me a list of some technologies I was supposed to use. They were some scientific software libraries and benchmarks. I've spend several months trying to understand them (lack of thorough documentation and people who use it is a real problem). I contacted my supervisor several times, but then he said me, that he does not have any experience with these technologies, that he just wanted them to be used in my thesis.


After several months of struggling I've contacted leader of one of our research projects and he recommended me to contact one of the researchers, who is specialized in one of technologies recommended to me. He is very busy, but during 3 months we've consulted my thesis several times and so I finished the first half of it.


The second half is the actual problem now, but the problem is, it's related to the software project which is being developed in our university, more specifically, it's being developed by the team where my supervisor is involved. This part unfortunately contains developing some very sophisticated algorithms which I'm not capable of (it's not the point of my thesis to develop algorithms and I don't have any experience with parallel algorithms of this level) and my supervisor is not able to help me. I'm trying to contact him two times a week, but usually he is just talking around and around nothing is solved, or he changes his mind and wants me to rewrite something we've agreed on one week before.


During this last year I've tried almost everything. I'm contacting people around the world who seem to have any experience with this. One day, when I was really desperate, I've tried to complain about his attitude officially, but I was told not to do so, that it would probably just make the situation much worse.


So now, I'm stuck with one algorithm, I'm working literally day and night and I'm proceeding, but, due to my inexperience in this field, terribly slow.


Do you have similar experience or some advice I could use? I've put sports, friends and almost everything else down to complete this thesis, but now I don't know really what should I do next.





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