SVF-3409 Ocean Leadership Master's Project - 30 stp

Ocean Leadership is an executive master’s degree for professionals within marine or maritime sectors who want to lead transformative change towards more sustainable futures.

The Ocean Leadership master’s project is carried out during the final year of the program and should demonstrate the candidate’s ability to lead the development and/or implementation of a practical change initiative to advance sustainability within their own professional domain.

The master’s project should support transformations towards more sustainable ways of thinking, acting, and/or organising within an ocean-based domain of relevance to the candidate and demonstrate knowledge, skills, and competences in Ocean Leadership as developed through the coursework components of the program.

The work on this change-oriented project is described in an independently written project report, which constitutes the candidate’s master’s thesis.

The learning outcomes for the master’s project in Ocean Leadership are:

Knowledge:

At the end of the project, candidates should demonstrate:

• Advanced knowledge of an important sustainability challenge and possible pathways forward within a professional domain of relevance.
• Understanding of the value of engaging diverse types of knowledge and/or stakeholders for addressing sustainability challenges.
• Specialized knowledge of how to lead advances in ocean sustainability in ways that are collaborative, adaptive, and reflexive.

Skills:

At the end of the project, candidates should demonstrate an ability to:

• Envision and explore new approaches to addressing sustainability challenges.
• Plan and implement independent projects in accordance with applicable ethical guidelines and norms for research and data management.
• Find and critically assess diverse sources of information to support projects with robust and verifiable evidence.
• Communicate clearly and compellingly with target audiences, including through the effective use of visual elements (e.g., figures, graphs, tables).

General Competences & Attitudes:

At the end of the project, participants should demonstrate an ability to:

• Value and advance sustainability within ocean sectors.
• Acknowledge and take leadership actions in the face of complexity.
• Develop and implement integrative and inclusive problem-solving.
• Recognize and realise their potential to be inspiring and innovative agents of change.
• Reflect on their own work and learning in ways that promote growth and development.

The master’s project is completed by the candidate under the guidance of an academic supervisor from UiT and a "profession-based" mentor from their own organisation or sector.

Candidates are free to propose their own supervisor and mentor. While supervisors for master’s theses in the Ocean Leadership program can be affiliated with any faculty at UiT, candidates are particularly encouraged to consider potential supervisors from across the collaborating institutes of the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Technology and Safety. A signed agreement between the candidate, the academic supervisor, and the profession mentor will be considered and given final approval by the institute leader at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science (or their appointed delegate).

The candidate is entitled to 20 hours of supervision from their UiT academic supervisor throughout the year of their master’s project, and it is anticipated that they receive a similar level of support from their profession mentor. This should include a minimum of 2 face-face meetings with both supervisor and mentor and at least 1 round of written feedback on a full draft of the project report. Additional face-face meetings or feedback on written drafts may be agreed by the supervisor, mentor, and candidate based on the available time.

In addition to the sessions with their formal supervisor and mentor, candidates will also have access to 2x1 hour online group supervision sessions offered to the whole cohort. These group sessions will be dedicated to issues likely to be common for many candidates in the conceptualisation or implementation of the project and/or write up of the report.