Unfortunately, Murphy’s law- the rule that anything can go wrong will- applies to the thesis writing process. The best advice I can offer to someone starting on this journey is to plan carefully, prepare well, and be ready to abandon any aforementioned plans. The ability to pivot, and come up with a new plan on the fly was how I was able to finish my thesis.
To illustrate this, I actually started with a completely different topic than what I finished with. When I began the thesis process, I was planning to conduct interviews with various cities around Indiana that had begun adapting their infrastructure in preparation for climate change. I wanted to investigate the reasons these changes were undertaken, in hopes of encouraging more cities to follow suit. However, I was respectfully turned down by each city I requested to interview. So, facing such opposition, I abandoned that topic over the summer, and began working on a new one, the social license to operate within the United States, which is now my finished thesis. While I was scrambling to figure out what to do next, and how to adapt my long, detailed, research plan to fit an entirely new topic, I quickly realized that I just had to throw myself in the deep and figure it out as I went. Your professors (and mine) will not recommend this approach. However, this flexibility allowed me to actually finish a thesis, and operate without a safety net.
Admittedly, switching topics was half the battle. I ran into countless roadblocks along the way. I’ll warn you now, life and other personal stuff will get in the way of your thesis. At the beginning of the semester, I simply planned to write from 9-12pm every Monday and Wednesday. While I broadly stuck to this schedule, and would encourage other students to do the same, the world didn’t end when I eventually had to deviate.
My thesis writing process was not a smooth one. It was full of unexpected bumps in the road, and I ultimately wrote, and subsequently deleted more words in a semester than I thought humanly possible. I quickly learned that things were not going to go as I had planned. When I began to roll with the punches, and dedicate my energies to devising a new plan, as opposed to trying to get back to the original one, things finally began to come together.
Shannon Halinski is a senior at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs.
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