First and foremost – welcome to the world of undergraduate thesis writing! If no one has told you this yet, I’d like to say I’m very proud of you for tackling this endeavor and I’ll let you know that you will survive! An undergraduate thesis may seem daunting but step by step you’ll get through it and complete an amazing paper.
Question is Everything
When I started V491 I had no clue what topic I wanted to pursue or what my research question would entail. I felt like I had no direction for picking a research question and I was anxious about picking something that hadn’t been discovered or discussed. I wanted a research question that would be interesting and prestigious enough for a thesis. After agonizing about my topic for weeks, I finally went with my gut and pursued what had been lingering in the back of my mind for weeks. The truth is – you should pick what you’re interested in, no matter what! Everyone has different interests and it doesn’t matter if your topic and question are vastly different from others.
Your research question and your overall topic are important for you. Don’t get caught up in what others are doing because at the beginning of the process, I did. I was worried that others were doing questions that were more academically rigorous or interesting. What matters is pursuing something you are interested in.
My classmates had a variety of research questions that dealt with everything from politics to the environment to government to pollution to animals. We all pursued something we were interested in or wanted to explain in a research paper. My topic was inspired by an environmental law class I took my sophomore year. One of my classmates picked a question inspired by a conservation biology class. And some people picked questions in topics that they were passionate about that had nothing to do with previous classes. Inspiration can come from anywhere for a topic and research question.
Get Comfortable
You’re going to be spending a lot time researching your topic which I know goes without saying. Researching a topic and pursuing a research question for months and months on end is daunting and exhausting. You’ll read countless research papers on the topic and dive deeper into the topic than you thought possible. It’s important to be comfortable with spending hours with your topic. I can’t imagine how I would’ve finished my thesis if I had picked something that I wasn’t immensely interested in. Reading research papers and articles and theories on my topic was never boring. It may have been overwhelming at times but I was truly interested and engaged.
Finish Strong
The last few weeks of completing your thesis are going to feel so short! I felt like time was never on my side and I couldn’t make progress fast enough. I started to get frustrated but at the end of the day, I loved what I was researching and the work I was doing. I was proud of what I had found from my data analysis. I was confident in what I had written. I wouldn’t have felt any of those things had I been researching something I wasn’t fully invested in. Keep up the good work and be confident in your writing and research abilities. You got this!
Safina Beaty is a senior at IU double majoring in Law and Public Policy & Environmental Management with a minor in Spanish. She plans on attending law school in the future and wants to work on helping the environment and mitigating the effects of climate change.
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