Heyy,
I thought I would start with one of the main components of any degree or research project: The dreaded dissertation. They're a long hard slog and are often responsible for the majority of your grade and marks. During my university career I have written two different types: a research project dissertation and a literature review. As I said previously not all Universities do it this way. I'm now going to split this post up and see if I can get my advice into some sort of helpful order.
The Literature Review
This was my 3rd year project as I wanted to get more writing experience and I knew I could do a laboratory based project in my 4th year. This project was split into 3 sections: the literature review, the grant proposal and the critical analysis.
A literature review (as the name suggests) is a review of the current literature about your topic. As well as for my 3rd year project this was also crucial for my 4th year project and will be highly important for my PhD as this is what will makeup your introduction. In a nutshell it's similar to an extended essay where you write about what is currently known about your topic, some of the key experiments used to find this out and the key reasons why knowing this stuff is actually relevant and important, i.e., why do we care?
The critical analysis involved reading through 5 primary papers (i.e. not review articles) used in your dissertation and analysing the methods and findings of each. This was very useful in determining whether a paper you have referenced was "good" or "bad" and how significant the results were, this can often be missed if you are skim reading to finish writing quickly. The grant proposal follows on from this. The main aim is to find a gap in the research, such as a gene or metabolic pathway that hasn't yet been studied in detail and then propose how you would go about looking at it. You then outline the experiments and contingency plans you would do and why this knowledge is useful and important.
The Dissertation
So moving on to my 4th year I undertook a laboratory project from September to May which culminated in my dissertation, viva and presentation. As you would expect it follows a general format: Introduction, research methods, results, discussion, then maybe a short conclusion followed by references. Quite straightforward...if only it wasn't so long and painful. So here are some of the tips that I found useful and should be applicable to most projects/theses/essays etc.
Tips and tricks
1) START EARLY
Now I really can't stress this enough, start reading through literature before your project officially starts and make notes. And the sooner you start writing your introduction the less work you'll have to do at the end.
2) MAKE DEADLINES AND MEETINGS
Make frequent and flexible deadlines so you have short-term goals to achieve, this makes the whole process much more manageable. Also meet often with your supervisor as they can give advice and allow you to see you research and results in a different light.
3) READ READ READ
Keep up to date with any big results and/or breakthroughs in the field you're studying. Your supervisor and markers will be impressed if you're on the ball.
4) BE ORGANISED
I learnt this the hard way. Make sure at the start of each week you know what you want to achieve, both in terms of lab work and writing your diss. Makes things a lot easier if you're not trying to figure out what to do all morning. If you have a plan you can be much more efficient. In terms of lab work I found printing out blank tables that only had the heading for my results on. This meant that I could note my results down clearly without pratting about drawing out tables on random bits of paper and then losing them.
5) HAVE A LIFE
Your work is important...but your health is more so. Make sure you take some time out to do something fun and unrelated to work, such as exercise, a hobby or going to the pub. This again makes the work more manageable and you're less likely to burn yourself out,
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