Masterthesis with a company

Q: How will the supervision work ?
A: You will need an authorized advisor as main supervisor (see FAQ). This will be your official supervisor.
You naturally also need a supervisor from the company to explain the situation of the company and to supervise you on a more
daily basis. If it comes to grading, deciding what to do or any conflict, the authorized advisor has full authority.

Q: Can I be employed by the company during the thesis ?
A: No. You are not allowed to be paid for writing the thesis, but you can get a reimbursement for living expenses.

Q: Is doing a thesis with a company more difficult ?
A: The main challenge is in communication: you will communicate with the company
and with your supervisor at ETH. In doing so, you should try to avoid
misunderstandings, and keep everybody on the same page.

Q: Are there any aditional admin requirements I have to meet in order to
write the Masterthesis with a company ?
A: No. Officially, you are writing your thesis with your authorized advisor.
If this supervisor agrees that a co-supervision with another ETH
Department or an external company makes sense, then this is his or her full
responsibility, and no other administrative instance from ETH will be
involved. The only exception is when the material is confidential.

Q: What if the material of the thesis is confidential ?
A: In principal, we can work with confidentiality agreements. Moreover, the
thesis need not be published online (but the abstract and the title
will). However, the thesis will be archived electronically and physically
locally at ETH. If sensitive data is involved, it is imaginable that you
would only work on a computer of the company. But final results (perhaps
anonymized) must be in the thesis. In that case, the thesis need not be
fully reproducible (since the data would be missing). It is up to your authorized advisor to decide upon the details on this. Please be aware, that this
adds another layer of complexity to your project: We would have to get into
touch with our legal departement to set up the confidentiality
agreement. Moreover, you could perhaps not benefit from our rather
convenient computing environment and backup systems.

Q: How do I know if my potential project is substantial enough for a
Masterthesis?
A: Please discuss this with your authorized advisor. However, here are some
important points:
While projects with companies are usually applied, you
have to make sure that it is a non-trivial application or even
an extension of existing high-level statistical methods. The
thesis may also contain a comparison study of many different methods
(perhaps writing a review as you go along) or focus directly on a narrow
field, discover the state of the art, and extend or adapt it to the current
problem setting. It must be clear for the company that there is no
guarantee of success (time might simply run out or you might have started
with an unsuitable method). Good projects are usually creative high-risk
projects which are interesting for the company but not at all vital. You
might explore and test out a novel idea, but cannot be asked to deliver a
ready-to-use solution like a software engineer.

Q: How can I find examples of previous Mastertheses with a company?
A: Have a look at our collection of past Mastertheses here:
https://www.math.ethz.ch/sfs/research/master-theses.html
Search for theses where co-supervisors are involved who are not from SfS and
have no professor title; if you inspect the title and abstract, you might
find out, that this thesis was written with a company. If you want to look at a hardcopy of a thesis, please contact our secretaries (G 10.3).