When I started looking for a master’s programme, I knew I wanted something that combined my background in psychology with my growing interest in AI, programming, and computational methods. At the same time, I didn’t want to lose the human and social dimension of research, because that has always motivated me most.
The Research Master immediately stood out because of its interdisciplinary structure. It’s a programme where social science, data analysis, and computational approaches come together in a way that feels both natural and exciting. It allowed me to deepen my technical skills while staying grounded in research that is socially meaningful.
From the beginning, my goal with this degree was twofold: to become a diligent, well-trained researcher capable of designing, conducting, and communicating research rigorously, and to use the programme as a stepping stone toward a career in data analysis or data science. I’m currently applying for positions as an academic researcher, data analyst, or consultant. In the long run, I hope to work in a field where I can use and further develop my technical skills while contributing to topics that matter to me personally and to society more broadly.
My thesis topic emerged in a very organic way. During the first year of the programme, you really get the time and freedom to explore your interests, and by the end of that year I already had two potential directions in mind. The research-focused structure of the programme, combined with the openness to follow your own curiosity, made it easy to find a topic that genuinely excited me. A key moment was the course Writing a Research Proposal, during which I wrote about a topic that ended up aligning closely with the work of a researcher in the department. The instructor connected us, and from this connection the thesis topic and supervision fell perfectly into place. Looking back, it feels almost like I naturally flowed into my thesis without fully realizing it at the time. I am still grateful for how well the programme facilitates finding both a topic and a supervisor who truly fits your interests.
My thesis focused on political storytelling and youth engagement on TikTok during the 2025 German federal elections. It was titled “Scrolling into Politics: Narrative Storytelling and Youth Engagement on TikTok during the 2025 German Elections – Developing P-TIM to Analyze Political Storytelling on TikTok.” At the core of the project was the question: How does political storytelling on TikTok operate and resonate, especially among young users? I adapted the existing Transportation-Imagery Model into a new Political Transportation-Imagery Model (P-TIM), tailored to the affordances of short-form video and the unique dynamics of TikTok. The research had two parts: qualitative interviews with German adolescents aged 17–18 to refine the model’s dimensions, and a multimodal analysis of TikTok content posted by political actors and influencers during the election campaign. Based on this, I developed a coding scheme to identify narrative techniques and patterns of user engagement.
The findings revealed two central dimensions of persuasive appeal: aesthetic engagement and narrative proximity. These became the foundation for a typology of four narrative styles used by political actors on TikTok. What surprised me most was how strongly the empirical data supported the theoretical assumptions I had started with. I expected to see elements of entertainment in political TikTok content, but I did not anticipate how clearly they would emerge and how systematically they could be categorized using the model I developed. This experience showed me how much potential there is in this relatively unexplored research area. In fact, we are hoping to publish the thesis, which I’m incredibly excited about.
If I were to continue this line of research, the first thing I would want to do is extend the model further and test it on a broader dataset, ideally with more computational power since proper analysis of large-scale multimodal content requires substantial technological resources. I would also love to apply the model to political TikTok content outside of Germany to see how well it generalizes across different electoral contexts, audiences, and media cultures.
At the moment, I am in the middle of job interviews, one in consultancy in the health sector and one in IT forensics, so I will soon know more about my next professional steps. I will happily share updates once things become more concrete. Even though these opportunities are not exactly the same as my thesis topic, they are strongly connected to my broader interests in data, technology, and socially relevant applications, which is ultimately the direction I hope to continue in.
