Writing your very first undergraduate dissertation can be an extremely exciting experience. Some of you may be rolling your eyes and shaking your heads right about now, however you have to realize that are writing your first major piece of academia. It is your first real taste of a long term, academic commitment, and your first real taste of dissertation writing. Many of you need thesis help in writing.

Now, you cannot underestimate the importance of your dissertation – after all, it is a big part in the ultimate attainment of your Bachelor’s degree – it can be the culmination of everything for which you have worked so hard. Because of that, you are strongly encouraged to start considering dissertation ideas as soon as you receive the assignment. The sooner you can get started, the better. Trust, this is not like most of the academic papers you will do in undergraduate school and, as such, it is definitely not a project which can safely be put off until the last possible minute.

You are also encourage to try to get onto a schedule, wherein you devote no less than half an hour each day on the actual process of dissertation writing. Considering the fact that there are so many components included in a good, strong undergraduate dissertation, this could make all the difference for you.

Now, as to those components, you need to begin with an abstract, which will give a summary of your research, but only to the end that is where you get to prove that your research is either original, unique, or both. It needs to address a question or an issue that is not found anywhere else on the subject. Next, as with any other dissertation, comes the introduction. This is where you will, of course, introduce your readers to your research, via your thesis statement.

Next comes the literature review, which focuses on the analysis of the sources you use to prove and/or strengthen your argument. These will be sources which have tackled similar topics. Following that comes the dissertation methodology, where is a detailed account describing the methods and tactics you used to obtain the results of your research, as well as why you chose those methods.

The last part of your actual undergraduate dissertation is the conclusion, wherein you will succinctly restate your thesis statement and reveal your final results. Following that comes both the acknowledgments, where you name and thank anyone who helped you come up with dissertation ideas or the act of dissertation writing itself, and then the works cited page, or bibliography, where you list sources and references.

Your undergraduate dissertation is your time to shine. It is your first big leap into academia and it will allow you to demonstrate the knowledge that you are attaining in your chosen field of study or interest. It will also set the precedent for how you tackle dissertations later on in your academic career. By getting started on the right foot, you might find that you are a dissertation expert by the time you are ready to go for your Master’s degree or Ph.D.

Once you finish your under graduation degree, most of you may be wondering about your higher education. There are numerous degree programs accessible for students with under graduation degree. For many students who had done Bachelor’s degree program, post graduation is obviously the next step in their education. Online Masterï’s degree is one of the most sought after post graduation degree programs. With an online Master’s degree, you can get expertise in a specific field, advance your existing carer, or increase your education.

The advantage of online Mater’s degree is that you can you can earn while you study. There are hundreds of online Master’s degree programs provided by many distinguished institutions. Earning an online education degree is again a good choice for students. With many opportunities available in the education industry, there is a constant demand for teachers and educators. Education degree is essential for people interested to work in public schools, private schools, colleges, and universities.

Other than online Master’s degree and online education degree, another online degree program which captivates students alike is online business degree. People studying online business degree programs usually concentrate in a particular field of study. Online business degrees comprise many faculties, some of them being retail management to marketing and advertising, computer science, and sports management.

Creative Problem Solving: Technical Theatre

This lesson plan was created to include students in the whole process of designing and transporting a set to our one-act competitions across the state. The lesson plan was also designed to accommodate gifted students in the class. While that was the original purpose, there is no reason why the leaders of the various teams have to be labeled as gifted, nor is there an inherent reason why the traveling set has to be taken to competitions.

The original lesson plan was created to take Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters to a theatre conference and to a region competition. We recently modified the plan to take Still's Hush: An Interview with America to a competition. The lesson plan actually helped us win a trophy for best technical performance. The references to commedia should be considered examples that will be modified by individual teachers.

For the most part, this plan requires students to identify the problem, look at the problem in a different way, find a creative solution, and evaluate that solution.

Introduction

The Problem

We have to build a set that captures the spirit of commedia dell’ arte and that fits the movement and tone of our play, but the set has to be able to travel, once to Statesboro and once to Demorest, Georgia. The set also has to be able to fit in a ten-foot square space to accommodate certain competition rules when not set up.

The Plan So Far

Each student will join one of three teams, each of which is led by a gifted student and each of which has a particular job to accomplish. Team One is working on costumes, Team Two is working on structural elements of the set, and Team Three is working on painting and decorating the set. None of these teams is set up to inherently fix the “mess.” Students will have to incorporate creative solutions into their designs and plans.

Mess Finding: Exploring the Situation

The Situation

We compete with theatre programs that often have more money and greater means for travel. In fact, we often compete with schools that have a full-time performance teacher and a full-time technical teacher. Despite the fact that our drama teacher is more trained in performance than in design and building, we have won at least two technical awards at competitions.

This year, we will perform Servant of Two Masters for our major competitions in the fall semester. Servant is a play from the later part of commedia dell’ arte’s golden age. The play takes place in Venice, Italy. The play’s spine (major theme) for this production is that this Servant shows how the individual became important during the European Renaissance to the point that a cunning and hard-working servant could improve his life without the help of others.

A further problem to this dilemma is that we have at least three different settings in the play: one inside Pantalone’s house, one in the town square, and one that includes tables. The last of these is supposed to be indoors, but we’ve actually already come up with an alternative plan. Regardless, the play requires three different settings, so the set has to be versatile and set changes have to be quick. (We have fifty-five minutes to move on to the stage, perform the play, and move off.)

Possible Steps

1. Students need to understand the spine of the play.
2. They need to define and universally understand the mood we are trying to set.
3. They need to design a set that will work with the actors’ movements.
4. They need to deal with the mess:

• How will we transport the set?
• How will we change the set from one scene to another?
• How will the set come apart so it is easily put back together at the competition sites?

Data Finding: Gathering Information

Resources

We have several resources that students can use to gather information on building this set, including the Internet, several textbooks, a video, and a teacher who is somewhat trained in commedia.

Possible Steps

1. We need to look up sets that other theatre companies have used for commedia.
2. We need to watch the videos I have ordered. They will be especially useful for Team One (costuming).
3. We need to experiment with ways of rolling sets on and off the stage.
4. We need to look at ways commedia sets were created originally and ways they are created in modern companies.
5. We need to brainstorm and make lists of sets we’ve seen other schools use in other competitions, not to copy their ideas but to adapt them into our own scheme.

Problem Finding: Rewording and Redefining the Problem

We need to look at the problem and try to find another angle, even if we do so just for the sake of making sure we understand what we are trying to accomplish. We need a set that looks good, that’s transportable, and that fits into the opening ten-by-ten square. We may need to look at taking fewer items to Statesboro and making sure we have what we need in Demorest, so we can win our region. Does the set need to roll, or should it be smaller blocks that can be carried easier? In other words, we need to avoid finding ways of solving a method; we need to find a method to solve our problem.

Example Key Questions:

• How might we create a set that will travel, to keep the set collapsible so we can fit it in the initial ten-by-ten square, use the relatively small tech crew to move the set on and off, and make sure the set earns tech award points?
• In what ways might we efficiently complete all of the tasks above in the relatively short time we have before our competitions?

Idea Finding: Listing Possible Solutions

Students will find all the possible answers to the questions we generated in the “Problem Finding” phase. For each solution, students should explain how their solution solves meets our goals (i.e. travels, takes up little space, and meets the play’s requirements).

Solution Finding: Assessing our Solutions and Selecting the Right One(s)

Students will list criteria that will be used to judge the solutions. They need to have at least five criteria, and those criteria need to ensure that any solution we accept will meet the needs of the overall team. Then, students should select the solutions that work and defend why those are the best solutions.

Action Planning: Getting R Done 

Students need to develop their own due dates so we can make sure we actually have time to accomplish our goals. (It’s ok if we don’t get everything done by the first competition as long as we have enough to put on the play and as long as we are totally ready by regional competition.) Students also need to keep track of any possible costs for their ideas. Money is tight, and it’s hard to spend due to all of the paperwork. We can’t have a need for something at the last minute. In some cases, students need to find sources to help us, and they may need to find time outside of our regular school and rehearsal schedule.

Leaders tend to possess and exemplify the qualities expected or required in their working groups. 

Physical courage (which appears on most of the lists of military leadership) will not actually make you a leader in battle, but you cannot be one without it. If you aspire to be a sales manager you should possess in large measures the qualities of a good salesman. The head of an engineering department ought to exemplify the characteristics of an engineer, otherwise he will not gain and hold respect. Thus, a leader should mirror the group's characteristics. 

Do you have to be tall to be a leader? Research into these more general characteristics bears out what history tells us. De Gaulle was tall; Napoleon was short. It really does not matter. Some general factors, such as intelligence and aptitude, do emerge from the research. 

After a comprehensive survey of 124 books and articles which reported attempts to study the traits and characteristics of leaders, R.M. Stogdill offered two conclusions based on positive evidence from 15 or more of the studies surveyed: 

The average person who occupies a position of leadership exceeds the average member of his group in the following respects: 

• intelligence 
• scholarship 
• dependability in exercising responsibilities 
• activity and social participation, and 
• socio-economic status 

The qualities, characteristics, and skills required in a leader are determined to a large extent by the demands of the situation in which he is to function as a leader. 

Yet everyone agrees that a leader needs to have personality in the common sense of that word. A leader may not be what P.G. Wodehouse called a 'matey' person. But have you ever met a true leader who totally lacked enthusiasm or warmth? Most leaders also have character. Someone once defined character as what you do with your personality and temperament, that inherited bundle of strengths and weaknesses. A better way of looking at it is to say that character is that part of personality that seems morally valuable to us. It is that sum of moral qualities by which a person is judged, apart from such factors as intelligence, competence or special talents. 

Character in Leadership 

'Character stands for self-discipline, loyalty, readiness to accept responsibility, and willingness to admit mistakes. It stands for selflessness, modesty, humility, willingness to sacrifice when necessary, and, in my opinion, for faith in God. Let me illustrate. 

During a critical phase of the Battle of the Bulge, when I commanded the 18th Airborne Corps, another corps commander just entering the fight next to me remarked: "I'm glad to have you on my flank. It's character that counts." I had long known him, and I knew what he meant. I replied: "That goes for me too". There was no amplification. None was necessary. Each knew the other would stick however great the pressure; would extend help before it was asked, if he could; and would tell the truth, seek no self-glory, and everlastingly keep his word. Such trust breeds confidence and success'. 

General Mathew B. Ridgway, later Supreme 

Commander of the United Nations Forces in Korea 

Whether a person tends to be introvert or extrovert is morally neither here nor there, but we do admire steadfastness in adversity or moral courage and compassion. What is the secret of this moral strength? Many writers on leadership have stressed the importance of integrity, which Viscount Slim defined as 'the quality which makes people trust you'. 

When there is this lack of trust in working relationships it is often a symptom of a failure in personal or corporate integrity. America forced President Nixon from office because he was judged not to be a man of integrity. 'I have often found,' said Harold Macmillan, 'that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man that nobody trusts'. 

The primary meaning of integrity is wholeness, but it also has a moral sense. It suggests the type of person who adheres to some code of moral, artistic or other values. Prominent among those values is the concept of truth. That is why most people virtually equate integrity with honesty or sincerity. Although it is impossible to prove it, I believe that holding firmly to sovereign values outside yourself grows a wholeness of personality and moral strength of character. The person of integrity will always be tested. The first real test comes when the demands of truth or good appear to conflict with your self-interest or prospects. Which do you choose? By going through such ordeals you are forging your personal integrity only as iron is plunged repeatedly into fire and then hammered on the anvil does it become steel.

Since 1934 quite a lot of leaders, observers of leaders, and trainers of leaders have been prepared to list the qualities that they believe constitute born leadership. The difficulty is that the lists vary considerably, even allowing for the fact that the compilers are often using rough synonyms for the same trait. Also they become rather long. In fact there is a bewildering number of trait names from which the student of leadership could make up his portfolio. Two researchers have compiled a list of some 17,000 words that can be used for describing personality. 

A study by Professor C. Bird of the University of Minnesota in 1940 looked at 20 experimental investigations into leadership and found that only 5 per cent of the traits appear in three or more of the lists. 

A questionnaire-survey of 75 top executives, carried out by the American business journal, Fortune, listed fifteen executive qualities: judgement, initiative, integrity, foresight, energy, drive, human relations skill, decisiveness, dependability, emotional stability, fairness, ambition, dedication, objectivity and co-operation. Nearly a third of the 75 said that they thought all these qualities have no generally-accepted meaning. For instance, the definitions of dependability included 147 different concepts. Some executives even gave as many as eight or nine. 

Apart from this apparent confusion, there is a second drawback to the qualities or traits approach. It does not form a good basis for leadership development. 'Smith is not a born leader yet', wrote one manager about his subordinate. What can the manager do about it? What can Smith do? The assumption that leaders are born and not made favours an emphasis upon selection rather than training for leadership. It tends to favour early identification of those with the silver spoon of innate leadership in their mouths. 

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the qualities approach altogether. It has been the custom to do so among academic social scientists studying leadership for two broad reasons. First, they could not invent the necessary instruments for scientifically identifying such intangibles as qualities of character, nor is it likely that they will do so. That is why the historian will always have as much to teach us about leadership as the behavioural scientist. Secondly, value judgements or hidden assumptions crept into the story. Social scientists tend to be strongly egalitarian. They dislike any idea that a person might have an 'inbred superiority' over another. Therefore, they are apt to discountenance the whole notion of leadership exercised by one person.