okay, here are a few suggestions:
1. do some online search to familiarise with the topic, locate the 'academic sources' required, decide on the topics to be covered. you can Google for "number of asset classes for a fully diversified portfolio", "how to build a fully diversified portfolio", "number of assets for a fully diversified portfolio", etc, and you should find plenty of information. for example,
http://www.schroders.com/staticf ... -Pension-Plans.pdf. some files may give out references at the end, and you can continue to search on the titles and authors of those references and then you will get your 'academic sources'. Another source to check is Google Scholar, or ssrn.com for academic papers. But this topic is an old one and you might be better off checking the textbooks specified for your course. There should be relevant sections on this topic.
2. read through the information you obtained in step 1. and try to understand the issues involves: why do we need to have different asset classes and assets for diversification? how these assets provide benefits? why and how they are different? (there are some hints in the link i copied above). how do you do decide whether you are 'fully diverisified'? why once you reach a certain stage of diversification, adding more asset classes and assets may not be beneficial anymore? the answers to these question will be more or less your answer to question 1.
3. you need to do some data crunching in this section and again there should be plenty examples on the internet. The key issues to this question include: (1) asset/liability of the pension fund (remember it is a pension fund and it is supposed to provide retirement income in 10 years time. 10 years is your investment horizon, and you can google for "investment horizon for pension fund". (2) risk/return for this pension fund. (3) liquidity concerns, given its size, not very large. (4) instruments to use, again it is not very large, so using Funds or ETF would be better. (5) passive or active. (6) cost. (7) currency issues. (8) periodic portfolio review.
This should be enough for a nice and long essay. You may want to post your essay here and we can then comment. Hehe.