Over the past year, I have written and presented on my very first thesis and here is some helpful advice for those of you who want to give it a whirl!
Have a Feasible Question…and A Way to Answer It.
When you first start the process of written a thesis, you first must present a question that you want to answer. But the question must be narrow enough so a 20 something year-old college student can provide an answer. Granted you have the internet at your fingertips, you still must account for all the time and effort that is needed to tackle the research. For example, a possible research question could be, “What are the effects of solar panel proliferation across the world?” It is a very interesting question that aims to provide more information to an important issue. However, it would be impossible to tackle such a large question in one semester! For this type of thesis, a better research question would be, “What are the effects of solar panel proliferation in Bloomington, IN?” Depending on time and your computer skills, you may even be able to expand it further to include the whole state of Indiana. Just keep in mind, you must complete the research, write the paper, and present all in one year.
Out There, Somewhere, the Data Must Exist
There may come a crucial point in your thesis process where you have an interesting question, and you are ready to start your research! You are happy, excited, and maybe a little intimidated by what is ahead. You log on to your computer and start looking for data to include in your research. An hour later you still have not found anything, but you push through. After a couple hours, you realize that the data you want may not exist or has not been collected yet! This exact thing happened to me and I had to change my entire project ¼ the way into the semester. If I took the time initially to think about whether the data was out there, it would have saved me a lot of heart ache in the future.
Netflix Will Always Be There…So Write!
For me, my thesis was one of the longest written projects of my life. At first, I was very apprehensive about tackling such a large project. During the Honors Thesis class, we were taught to build a schedule for ourselves and carve out “writing time” where we would solely work on writing our thesis. Each written session did not seem like much, but after a couple of months the thesis was written! Trust the process and schedule out some writing time!
Thank you, Prof Baggetta and good luck, for those writing their thesis!
Leave a Reply