When I joined the honors program during my freshman year, I did not consider what writing an honors thesis would entail. Rather, I wrote it off as a problem for future me, something that I would push into my subconscious and never think about for 2 years. But unfortunately, my senior year started, and I was forced to confront the honors thesis head on during V491. If you are an underclassman and in the same position I was, don’t panic. If I and so many others can write a thesis in only 1 academic year, you can too. Here are a couple of helpful tips though to make all honor students’ lives easier and hopefully reduce the amount of stress or the number of all-nighters caused by the thesis.
- Plan your thesis early and thoroughly
In V491, we design our research question and draft sections of the final thesis, such as the literature review and methodology. To avoid having to redo work, you should decide early in the semester your research question, advisor, and methodology. When you first meet with your advisor, you should plan your entire thesis. I don’t think anyone ever does this, but it would have saved us a lot of stress in V499, such as how to collect or analyze our data. The biggest reason to plan the thesis is so there are no surprises, such as not knowing how you will collect your data. While planning, remember that the more work you do at the beginning, the less work and stress you will have when deadlines start quickly approaching.
- Get help from others
In case this has not been explicitly stated yet, I will say it here. You are not expected to complete the thesis by yourself. There are so many resources available that you should use, such as your advisor, PhD students, other honors students, and other professors. For example, if you are doing quantitative analysis, but you have no previous statistical experience, you can ask your advisor for help or contact a PhD student to help you with the analysis. The same goes for other complicated programming, such as collecting data using web scraping or APIs. This suggestion builds on the previous suggestion because getting help from other people involves advance planning. You might be okay with pulling an all-nighter to analyze your entire data, but a professor or PhD student is not.
- Have fun
This might seem like a weird thing to include because course work is assigned, regardless of whether you actually want to do it. However, an honors thesis is different. First and foremost, it is optional. You can graduate without departmental honors, which almost everyone does. Second, an honors thesis is designed to give you experience doing academic research. Research is much more meaningful and fun if you are researching something you are interested in. For example, if you love social media, you can research the effect of Twitter on a certain outcome, such as political polarization in the U.S. This also extends to the type of analysis you do. If you hate numbers, you can do qualitative analysis, such as a case study. Do not let your own research abilities limit your research because you can always ask for help. However, you need to make sure that what you want to do is doable in your time frame, commonly one academic year. At the end of the day, you will get more out of the honors thesis and have a better finished product if you are excited about the research.
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