Writing a thesis can be many things. For some, it is the culmination of one’s academic life at Wesleyan, bringing everything one has learned in the classroom to fruition through an original and independent research project. For others, it is a conduit to graduate school, a means to flex one’s intellectual muscles. And for still others, it is hell on earth, a blurry and masochistic academic year spent over a large coffee mug in the thesis carrel. For many, it is some combination of the above.
“Before your senior year, you hear so much from seniors, professors, [etc.], about how hard it’s going to be to write a thesis, how much time it’s going to take, and how it’s going to destroy your life,” said Zack Boger ’06, who earned Honors in Film Studies for his comedy screenplay. “So if you do a thesis, you’re probably already way more worried about how difficult it is than you need to be. But it is a lot of work. Just planning the plot, characters, and basic action of each scene took all of first semester.”
Boger was not the only one who found the work involved in writing a thesis to be difficult.
“It was much more work than I thought,” said Kevin Lohela ’06, who earned Honors in Government. “The last two weeks before it was due were hell on earth, or should I say, SciLi basement. I was terrible at balancing my time. I wrote my last 20-page chapter the night before the whole thing was due. It was crazy.”
Despite the almost universal refrain about the work involved in completing a thesis, it is a well-trodden path among Wesleyan seniors, one that an average of 261 students have chosen to follow per year since 1999. Out of those who initiated work on their theses in the same time period, an average of 84 percent completed and submitted them for consideration. Recently students have performed better, with 92 percent of thesis writers in the class of 2005 receiving some form of honors. In the class of 2005, 31 percent of honors recipients received High Honors, and two students were awarded University Honors. In the current crop of seniors, 259 students made it through the writing process and have registered their theses—a high proportion given the 1999-2005 average of 261 would-be honors candidates at the outset of the year, but an indeterminate gauge until other numbers are released.
“I just completed my third season of thesis collection and this year’s process went very smoothly,” wrote Honors Coordinator Susan Krajewski in an e-mail. “I think that is in large part due to the elevated degree of communication I have had with the honors candidates. I try to stay in touch (without pestering them) to constantly remind them of deadlines and such.”
What is unique about thesis writing, at least in the context of the rest of college, is that it is largely a self-driven process, relying on each individual student’s ability to structure his or her own time effectively. In this regard, the writing process is often very different from person to person. While for some writers their thesis represents a chance to delve deeply into an issue that has been on their mind throughout college, others come to their topics much later.
“I had read about a book and a half by the beginning of senior year,” said Justin Costa ’06, a Government major who earned Honors on his thesis about political philosopher John Rawls. “[My advisor] just said, ‘Read this, this, and this, come back and let’s talk every week.’ It was fairly easy-going, but it gets to be a lot, especially for theoretical theses, which tend to snowball.”
Nabil Ansari ’06, a COL major, earned High Honors on his thesis on the ethical and social theory of Jürgen Habermas, a topic he came to only during the summer before his senior year. Most of his time was spent reading Habermas and relevant thinkers to fully grasp his topic, a process that continued to evolve second semester in his classes. It took until the following February for him to complete an outline of his thesis, and he only began writing what would become a 140-page thesis in the months after that.
“I’m used to working in a kind of bottom heavy fashion with a lot of things happening at the end,” Ansari said. “It’s kind of an open-ended process—there’s not really any logic to ending it in April. It could go on, and I was going to read and understand as much as I could before I wrote.”
But many theses begin even before the formally registered thesis tutorial in the fall of senior year, commonly with a Davenport Grant.
“The thesis is a question of time,” said Benjamin Magarik ’06, a CSS major who earned Honors writing on the political liberalism advanced by Rawls. “The Davenport gives you extra time and resources. The people reading theses don’t care about the Davenport, but getting a grant gives you a formal three months or more to think about the question.”
Magarik used the Davenport Grant to travel around the United States and speak to Christian evangelicals as part of what he thought would be a larger project focused on religion and politics. In the end, he refocused his thesis on the more general ideological debates within political liberalism, a decision that he now regrets.
“Specificity is key,” Magarik said. “My topic was too broad, and as a result, I didn’t fully integrate the three main bodies of critical discourse on political liberalism.”
Though he admits that he consciously chose not to put in the sustained effort needed for a High Honors thesis, Magarik is pleased with the outcome.
“Thesis writing is fundamentally ascetic,” he said. “I was never able to get into it deeply in a consistent way. There were too many things in my life. I like to be social, read the New York Times every day, go to parties, and I needed to look for a job. Senior year is a rollercoaster.”
To others, such as Rebecca Rosenfelt ’06, who anticipated her topic since her sophomore year, writing a thesis has provided the opportunity to explore a topic that has personal as well as academic meaning. Rosenfelt, a CSS major, earned High Honors for her interdisciplinary analysis of the pornography industry from economic and feminist perspectives.
“It gave this entire past year of my life a purpose,” Rosenfelt said. “A lot of myself is in it. My mom told me, ‘Rebecca, this is you. Every aspect of you is in this thesis.’ And I said, ‘Mom, you’re crazy.’ Then I realized that I was in those 180 pages.”
Rosenfelt, with money from the Davenport grant, traveled and conducted interviews with women working in the pornography industry, reading all she could on the topic. Without any idea of how her project would be received, especially because she did not consult any CSS faculty about her ideas, Rosenfelt found the commendation bestowed upon her thesis a validation of her personal and career goals.
“It was very satisfying to get that affirmation, because it was so personal—I did it in a very ‘Rebecca’ way, and for these people to say that was a good way, it was immensely satisfying,” Rosenfelt said.
For some, such as Costa, writing a thesis was intellectually rewarding but not a project of larger life significance.
“I’m going into politics and I know for a fact that [my thesis] will have no effect on my career,” Costa said.
Rosenfelt, however, plans to make her thesis the crux of her career after college, hoping to turn her work into articles and possibly a book, while launching porn.perspectives.typepad.com, a blog devoted to discussion of pornography.
Despite the varying experiences of the thesis writers, many of their words of advice for future seniors touch upon the same themes. Foremost, seniors say, choose a topic that has personal significance and will provide lasting power when the caffeine wears off.
“If I was writing a research paper on Nicomachean Ethics, I would probably have a difficult time getting excited about writing that last forty pages during spring break,” Boger said. “But I am really interested in and excited about comedy, I loved my story, most of the time, loved my characters, and so I made time for writing because I wanted to, not because I was being forced to or was working under a deadline.”
Those who have seen many senior theses have similar advice.
“I would say put a lot of thought into selecting a viable topic that is also highly interesting to you,” said Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Honors Committee David Beveridge. “Maintain an evolving one-page overview of the central questions involved, how you are addressing them, what you are coming up with, and the implications thereof. Otherwise you can fly all over the place quite expertly but not end up finding the landing strip.”
Once an interesting topic is selected that a student is passionate about, the next step is to work and plan ahead—and print early.
“A lot of the headache and frustration with my thesis was with printing out my thesis, just because I was printing a lot of images and the printers every now and then would just backfire on me,” said Vivian Lew ’06, who earned High Honors in Psychology for a visual-oriented thesis on the contents of women’s handbags. “It took me the course of four days just to print out two copies of it.”
Costa, who is president of WesDems this semester, stresses balance and organizing time as efficiently as possible.
“What I had to do for balance was to do everything outside of my thesis very quickly,” Costa said. “Get as many things moving as possible, know that you can only spend five minutes tops on this e-mail. Be more reactive. If you do it right, it’s really intellectually rewarding.”
“You learn so much about your topic as you write it,” Rosenfelt said. “Even if you don’t use your writing, work through it.”
In the end, despite the grueling hours spent researching and writing, some take comfort in the thesis as the last bastion of college youth, the final coming-of-age ritual.
“I still haven’t left my thesis carrel,” Magarik said. “It’s like leaving the womb.”
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