How can I have more than 35 pages of combined writing, outlines, and sources and still feel as if I might not make my draft deadline next week?
Welcome to senior thesis.
Whereas the rest of the country is on Spring Break, I have
just retreated into the Thesis Hermitage, where all I do is research, write,
and edit. Why? Because, to quote the dean of my college, “Your Spring Break
will suck and mine won’t.”
Want to know what writing a thesis is like? Check out this
Tumblr. It’s pretty darn
accurate.
My thesis is on a topic near and dear to my heart: how the
museum experience is affected by the physical structure of a museum. And now
you see the problem inherent in theses. They are, by and large, boring to the
majority of the population. Which means that roommates, classmates, and random
strangers all begin to get glassy eyes after about 2 minutes of conversation on
a thesis topic. Theses are long, in depth, well researched bodies of
literature. At least they are for liberal arts majors. Other disciplines have
creative theses that take other forms, but for me and most of the people I
know, it comes as a long, long, paper. 40 pages is pretty average. And that’s
just the writing, not the sources, miscellaneous direction pages, or figures,
tables, and graphs. It’s a lot. And it will tear you down and remake you.
Thesis writing goes something like this:
1. You begin in the excited stage where you love your topic
and are convinced that everything that you write is amazing.
2. Then you calm yourself into the working stage where you
know that what you write is going to need editing, but is still basically good
(this is the ideal stage).
3. Next, you find yourself falling into the pessimistic
stage where you are writing because you know you need to, but you’re sure
you’re going to have to scrap just about everything and write it over.
4. This is followed by the denial stage where you don’t know
why you are writing a thesis because obviously you don’t know how to write and
this topic is stupid anyway (this is the bottom of the barrel).
5. At the bottom of the barrel is the pity stage where you
know that, despite hating your topic and your thesis, you know you’ll still
have to write it (this stage often involves tears).
6. Then begins the upswing stage where you start to talk to
someone about your topic and get animated again because you remember why you
chose this topic in the first place (this stage often involves a breakthrough
overcoming a major brain block).
7. Which brings us back to the excited stage where you
remember why you wanted to write a thesis in the first place, and begins the
cycle all over again.
The run time of this cycle varies from person to person, but
I’ve found I tend to run about a week and half. Which means I have one weekend
of serious work where I get tons done and then a week where I can’t hardly get
anything done because my topic doesn’t even really make sense to me anymore.
It’s vicious and not for the faint of heart.
However, should you attempt it, here is some advice my
advisor gave me that is still the best advice on thesis writing I’ve ever
heard:
“There are two types of theses. Good ones, and finished ones.”
