Your thesis may feel daunting now, and it will potentially be one of the toughest challenges of your academic career, but it will all work out in the end. One of the biggest lessons I have learned throughout writing my thesis is that patience is necessary, especially if you are doing quantitative research because it is very unlikely your model will work on the first try or even the fifth. It may seem easy to give up, but here are some tips to keep you from wanting to quit.
1. Your topic is very important!
When choosing a topic, make sure you are passionate about it. Your thesis will take at least two semesters, so you want a topic that will keep you engaged. Through all the ups and many downs with my thesis, I was able to continue because of how I enjoyed my topic. I wanted to find the answers to my questions and keep reading as much as possible to see what others have found on the subject. It may take a few tries to find exactly what you want to study, but that is the purpose of V491!
2. Summer is the perfect time for data!
If I could give any advice to a student who has not yet started the Honors Program, it is to start in the spring semester and finish in the fall. My second piece of advice to pair with this is to make sure you go into the summer with preliminary datasets so that you can start the data-cleaning process and hopefully start analyzing the data before the fall semester. I offer this piece of advice because it took me FOREVER to find the right dataset that had enough data to do a regression. It took even more time to clean my data and finally get the regression to work. If you are able to get the data cleaned over the summer, you will be in a much better position at the beginning of V499.
3. Not statistically significant is NOT the end of the world.
My next piece of advice would be to not be discouraged if your regression in R or STATA comes back as “not statistically significant”. When I finally got my regression to work and saw that the results were not significant, I felt terrible. After months of work and trial and error it was discouraging to see that the data was “not statistically significant”. However, it made me look deeper into the reasons for why the data may be the way it is and evaluate other factors that could have been impacting my results.
The thesis process is long and will not always be enjoyable, but in the end, it is very rewarding to have a paper to show all the hard work that you have put in.
Abbey Miller is a graduating senior majoring in Policy Analysis at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.
Leave a Reply