6 Oct 2011
Diary of an MW student – part 29
![Image](/jancis-public/styles/article_xs_x1/public/legacy/images/articles/b7b4c602b00a71ee50f1ca105b348d49d.jpg)
It shouldn’t be called a dissertation. It should be called academic waterboarding.
The only thing more torturous than doing an MW dissertation is convincing people how much harder it is than ‘just a long essay’. I’m enduring grievous palpitations just trying to formulate a title, and that’s not even supposed to be the difficult bit.
The difficult bit is the original research, the statistics and the analysis. For example, a survey of wine producers in your chosen region might require the distribution of several thousand questionnaires, which might be one hundred questions long. Enough of them must be returned to...