Tips for tackling your thesis

Writing a thesis is without a doubt an emotionally loaded process. You want to do it right, and you want to be proud.

On the other hand, sticking to one thing for months, a year, or even three or four years can be really frustrating. Preserving energy and focus is often a challenge.

Add all the outside expectations to the equation, suddenly you have a giant monster ahead of you that you want to do nothing but avoid.

Remember that it happens to everybody. “I feel like I’m lost” is probably the sentence that is most frequently uttered by thesis writers – even by the very people whose work you admire.

Make no mistake, the dimensions of the thesis-monster will scare you, but the moment you realize all the monster actually wants is love and care, there’s no reason why you can’t learn to get along. Here’s how to prepare yourself for that moment.

Choose an advisor that you can be best buds with

Feeling like you’re lost is in the nature of thesis-writing. You will go through countless ups and downs, and that is okay. In moments like these, no person’s advice will be as helpful as your advisor’s.

Advisors are the ones who have been through it. They are the ones who know your research as much as you do. Unfortunately, not all faculty is up for friendly sharing sessions. Some professors are only in it because they have to be, and some have egos that are 24/7 prepared to tell you you’re wrong.

You might have chosen an extremely respectable advisor with a long career, but if they are not someone you can make silly jokes with or feel comfortable saying no to, most of your problems will remain unaddressed.

You should be able to share comfortably and they should be the kind of people who are open to building strong relationships with their advisees.

When communication is a problem in a student-advisor relationship, it is highly likely that you will end up trying to write only for them, and not you.

Don’t worry about writing something ‘cool’ 

A lot of the graduate students fall into the trap of wanting to write about something ‘cool.’ They try to write about Russia and Ukraine, for example, when the only thing they know about Vladimir Putin is that he speaks Russian.

Writing about a country with a billion year-old past is really hard to tackle. If you can be successful, it will for sure make you look cool among friends. You can actually make them feel bad about having no knowledge of the world as you brag about Lenin’s heritage. But it’s a trap. Using your thesis to turn yourself into someone you have always wanted to be would only elevate the level of difficulty of an already-challenging process.

Find a topic that connects with your past. Find the topic that grows you as a person, that doesn’t change you but enriches you. Asking good questions is the core of writing a good thesis. How can you expect to ask the right questions if you choose a topic you haven’t thought about your entire life?

Make sure to connect with people

Including people in your research can be really painful. You have to go through long IRB approval processes because of what several scientists have done in the 20th century’s notorious research abuses, such as the Stanford prison experiment.

It’s perfectly understandable that you want to avoid it, but my suggestion would be to always keep in mind how fascinating humans are. Their experiences can take your thesis to a completely different level. When you are reading and reading the whole time, talking to people can shake up your reality – broaden your world making your thesis incredibly rich.

Even if you are an engineer, do have a chapter about how people approached your project and what functionality they added to it. A lot of my friends who were intimidated by the IRB protocol regretted their decision about not having the human factor in their theses.

Remind yourself that the best thesis is a finished thesis

While you are writing your thesis ‘Just do it’ should be your motto. Reminding myself of this gave me the motivation to continue no matter how desperate I felt at times.

You might be uncertain about your data, but it shouldn’t be keeping you from writing.

Do the writing first, and don’t feel like it has to be perfect. Just focus on what you have, and the deadline ahead of you.