Horrible Time Struggle since requirements for my Master Thesis increased - what can I do?

Hey guys!

I have a huge problem:

I’m writing my master’s thesis on the topic “User Acceptance of Autonomous Buses” as a systematic review, and I’m currently stuck in a massive data set. I have to analyze 100 studies and 60 real-world projects (after having to do the research and preparation for this on my own, of course). Since I found some relatively good reviews that did something similar to what I’m doing - but with fewer studies and fewer projects - I thought it was still doable.

However, my professor suddenly ramped up the requirements last week: I’m not only supposed to describe the variables in my studies descriptively and then include a synthesis (as is standard in reviews), but now also identify every possible context in combination with the variables (there are around 100(!)) and then organize them into frequency tables to analyze the whole thing.

The problem is, however, that as I said, I now have nearly 100 variables, some of which appear often across the 100 studies - with 20 constructed contexts...

However, since I only have 2.5 weeks left (!!!) and need to write about 50 pages (including figures), I’m currently in a horrible situation: instead of starting to write the text a week ago, I feel like I’ve been working on the analysis 24/7 every day, and somehow there’s no end in sight.

Do you know what I could do to evaluate/analyze the data more quickly? For the review analysis, I’m of course using AI as a tool (which is what I’m allowed to do), but even with that, my progress is extremely slow. I can’t narrow down the context or variables until I know how the frequencies are distributed - which means at the very end after I analyzed it. And unfortunately, my professor has emphasized that it’s important to him that I analyze all the factors...

I’d be really grateful if anyone has an idea on how I could still pull this off. I can’t even blame myself that much for starting too late, because I’ve been working on my thesis almost every day since early February (though in more manageable portions than now), yet I’m somehow in a hopeless situation.

Best regards!

Posted Apr 24, 2026, 8:20 PM UTC

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