Evaluation and Conclusions

I've finished writing the Evaluation and Conclusion chapters of my thesis. I wrote them in parallel because they were very interrelated. I started outlining the chapters from the ideia register document, collected over the course of the work. It made it much easier not to forget anything at this late stage.

For the Evaluation, I identified the most relevant results. In my thesis, almost all results were qualitative and not quantitative. Still, it was very useful to include summary tables to capture the overall results in a quick, visual way.

For the Conclusion, I wrote three subsections: Contributions, Future Work and Final Comment.

In Contributions, I identified the contributions from each chapter of the thesis in bullet points, adding some comments. I summarized using short sentences like "A is better than B at something because of this and that". I ended with a main contributions list with just three items, that I considered the "juice" of the work, i.e., what people would most likely find useful.

In Future Work I wrote down the new work ideas and opportunities. It was a fun subsection to write, because you realize how your work opened up new improvement paths to explore.

To finalize, in the Final Comment subsection, I gave my personal opinion about the subject. It was the time and place to "make the strike on goal" (in soccer terms) or to "take the ball to the basket" (if you prefer basketball).

The hardest work of thesis is finished. Now I'll wait for additional comments from my advisor and I'll finish the references section.

More about the 'refs' on my next post. Bye!