{"id":1815,"date":"2015-04-17T02:50:53","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T02:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/?p=1815"},"modified":"2015-04-17T02:50:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-17T02:50:53","slug":"beginning-thesis-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/2015\/04\/17\/beginning-thesis-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginning Thesis 101"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doing a senior thesis can feel a lot like walking around with an anchor, barnacles and all, tied to your back. It absorbs all your spare minutes and then some, ties your brain in a knot, and slowly compresses your social life until you realize the last time you had a girl\u2019s night was two months ago. Of course, it can also be an intellectually and creatively rewarding experience. It is an opportunity for us to put what we\u2019ve learned into practice and come out with a big\u2026something <\/em>at the end. Personally, I\u2019ve been working on my first novella. I\u2019m midway through the rough draft and it\u2019s about fifty pages, the longest thing I\u2019ve ever written. Keeping in mind that I\u2019m only at the beginning of the process, here are some tips that will hopefully make it easier for you than it was for me.<\/p>\n

1.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Start early. It can take weeks to find a director and a reader, let alone start writing it. Your adviser doesn\u2019t always do this so you may have to ask around. Make sure you\u2019re working with professors you\u2019re comfortable with.<\/p>\n

2.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Meet with your director often. You really don\u2019t want to find out fifteen pages into it that they think you should be doing a completely different topic. I had to scrap twenty pages of research notes because they no longer fit with the context of my novella. It was painful.<\/p>\n

3.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Apply for summer research. Every year UPS offers summer research stipends, which are about $3250 a piece. If you get one of these stipends you can take the summer to focus entirely on your thesis. I received one for the summer of 2015. As a college student with a minimum of ten things on my to-do list, it is going to be a real blessing. I can take my time and make my thesis the best it can be.<\/p>\n

4.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Revise. Then revise again. Repeat. Good writing isn\u2019t written it\u2019s rewritten.<\/p>\n

5.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Choose a topic that you\u2019re passionate about. There will be nights when you really don\u2019t want to work on your thesis. That forcing yourself to write will feel like dragging yourself to an eight o\u2019clock organic chemistry class. This makes those nights easier.<\/p>\n

So this is what I\u2019ve learned so far. Also, apparently I need to add more setting description. My novella currently sounds like it\u2019s taking place in a vacuum. But that\u2019s what second drafts are for. The first draft is just to get words on the page. Anything beyond that is a bonus. So good luck and remember; it doesn\u2019t have to be perfect. It just has to be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doing a senior thesis can feel a lot like walking around with an anchor, barnacles and all, tied to your back. It absorbs all your spare minutes and then some, ties your brain in a knot, and slowly compresses your … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/455"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1817,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}