Essay Deadline: Please note, the deadline for essay is June 2. Please submit to TA: zakiah@kth.se
Requirement:
Essay Writing
The format and content of the essay is left for the individual to decide. For example, it could be a proposal for a new business concept, or about how some text book theory relates to one of the talks. Summarizing and comparing 2 lectures given on a similar area is also a possibility.
It will be necessary to carry out a literature search and read a few articles as the essay must have references. The level should be such that it would be understood by any other EE student and that they would benefit from reading it. Note that the essay should not be a simple reference to what others have said but should contain your own thoughts or view point.
Essay should be submitted to: zakiah@kth.se
- The essay should be 1500 to 2000 words.
- The essay should be properly referenced.
- The essay must be your own words. Plagiarism (using the writings of someone else without proper referencing) is completely unacceptable and will result in the mark "fail" (You have to redo the entire course including attending seminars).
- If the connection between your essay and the seminars is not completely obvious, then you need to explain the connection in your essay.
- The essay may be written in Swedish or English.
Some of the best essays from previous years can be found here.
Essay submission and marking
The essay should be submitted in electronic form to zakiah@kth.se. The format .pdf is preferred. Documents occupying more than 2 Megabyte of space will not be accepted.
The essays will be marked either "pass" or "do the following ... in order to pass". Note that plagiarism will result in the mark "fail".
The deadline for essay submission is:
June 2, 2013 no later than 23.59.
Referencing
Whenever you write a scientific essay or paper it is important to know where you got the input to your work, i.e. to know what your sources are. For the reader (of your essay) it is important to be able to separate your own work and your conclusions from what have been done by others. This is done by making references to texts you have read.
It is usual to indicate where the references are used within the document and then list the references at the end of the document. There are a number of different ways of doing this. You can chose which style you follow. Here are three examples of referencing style:
- IEEE Transactions on Communications use a number in square brackets [ ] to indicate which reference is being referred to. The references are listed in order of appearance in the document. This is the most commonly used way of making references for engineers and most of the papers at the EE web site use this kind of references.
For more details on the IEEE style of referencing and formatting have a look at this website.
There are some more things that you can do that will make your referencing easier to use for the reader.
When you reference a web site, include the date that you collected the information. Avoid referencing web sites that are likely to be updated rapidly.
When referencing books it is important to state where the information came from within the book. For example, if the book is reference 2 and the information is taken from page 135 then the reference [2, p.135] could be used.
Quoting the work of others (properly using the writings of others)
Using parts of other peoples work is OK provided that you make it clear that it is not your own and make it clear where it has come from:
- One way to do this is to put the words of the other author in "quotes". It is also important to make it clear where the quote comes from. Example:
As noted by Le Roux [18], "propagation modes reflected by the same layer are generally highly correlated".
When marking the essays, an entire sentence copied word for word or with just a few words changed, without referencing, will be considered as plagiarism.
Quoting the work of others is useful for showing what other people think about the topic. But quotes should be used sparsely. It is important to also put your own words and own opinions into the essay. An essay that completely consist of quotes is unacceptable.