CARI Advice

Dear CARI Seniors and prospective thesis writers,

Congratulations on making it to the end of CARI and the end of your undergraduate experience at IU! That is truly a remarkable feat, and Professor Baggetta’s course will be an excellent capstone to the year.

Don’t be afraid to be ambitious.

My biggest piece of advice to you would be, if there is something further you can do, some additional research you might be able to conduct, some advanced writing goal you’re thinking of setting, do it. When I was writing my thesis and conducting my research, I had the resources available to do extensive interviews on my thesis topic. While I had briefly considered it myself, I always found ways to dissuade myself, such as either the IRB process would take too long, it would lead to an unbalanced study, or I wasn’t well suited to do them. It wasn’t until my advisor encouraged me to do the interviews that I did them, and they ended up being an incredibly beneficial experience, and a hugely important part of my thesis.

The main takeaway of this is that, if you have potential research resources available to you, you should pursue them, even if they appear difficult, hard, or have logistical issues for your research. Your advisor and Professor Baggetta will be an incredible resource in helping support you as you go about addressing different kinds of research issues, and pursuing hard questions and topics is what makes CARI so great. During those moments of evaluating a difficult research approach or designing an ambitious writing structure, I would encourage you not to be afraid of the challenge or workload. If you have made it this far in CARI, you have what it takes to aggressively pursue your research goals and end the semester with a top notch thesis!

Don’t be afraid to write.

Now, even though I strongly encourage each and every one of you to pursue your research and thesis writing goals, and not be held back by a fear of something not working out, it’s important to have effective time management in order to make it happen. Professor Baggetta will strongly encourage you many times throughout the course to set up specific time to write for your thesis. I think that this is an incredibly helpful habit.

However, something specific that I found helpful was getting over the fear of writing the wrong thing. In undergrad, it seems like we all have to write the perfect essay the first time, and after the first time, it needs to be perfect (because we either don’t have the will or time for extensive revisions). One of the most helpful things for me as I was writing my thesis though, was not being afraid to just write, even if it was total word vomit. Your thesis is not your typical college class essay, and just writing can be helpful in getting words on the page, and establishing analysis through your writing. You would not believe how helpful writing can be for finding results in your research.

But really though, just getting words on the page is the most important part. With a 12,000 word thesis, it’s impossible to have 100% well crafted writing the first time the words touch the page. Also, not being afraid of going back and doing extensive revisions really made me feel free to write quicker and so much more than I would have normally. So ultimately, my second piece of advice would be, don’t be afraid to write the wrong thing. There will be time to revise your paper and make it a top notch thesis.

 

While there will be all kinds of helpful advice to write the best thesis, my biggest tips would be to not be afraid to go above and beyond, and to not be afraid of putting words on a page. I think everything starts to flow once you have this down, and it will help greatly in getting through the thesis course. I’m excited to see where you’ll go!