The third and final installment of Juha Tupasela’s guide to writing your thesis available only on BTSB. The first and second installments can be found here and here. Enjoy.

Back again! This time in less than a year. In this third and final ramble, I talk about what happened to me when I finished writing my thesis.

As it turned out, quite a lot.

By the time I handed in the complete draft to my supervisor, he had already commented on earlier drafts of each section. This would be the last check, and after it my last opportunity to make changes before handing in the final draft for evaluation. When he took my paper, my supervisor asked me what grade I had in mind. By then, I was already pretty sick of my thesis, and the deadline for the graduation ceremony was closing in, so I put any lingering dreams of revolutionizing the way English literature is studied to rest and aimed for a decent, if not spectacular, grade. After getting his comments, it only took me a week or two to put on the finishing touches, and I found myself in the almost surreal position of having a complete master’s thesis—title page, table of contents, bibliography and all—sitting on my desk in front of me. Three of them in fact, because the Humanities Faculty requires you to submit two and I wanted to have a copy bound for myself as a souvenir.

Handing over my thesis at the faculty office drove home the fact that the project that I had started and been working and struggling with for so long was actually over. It was a moment I’d been waiting for a long time. I left the office feeling good, and bought myself a nice meal and a beer. Then I remembered that I still had three 2,000-word essays to write before I could graduate.

The downer wasn’t so much that the essays would be a lot of work, they weren’t. It was more that it was just a bummer to have completed the biggest writing project I’d ever undertaken and then still not be completely done with university. It felt like reaching the top of a steep hill and realizing that before you could walk downhill-or even enjoy the view-you have to cross a really boring plateau. On the plus side, having been writing almost every day for over two months straight meant that I was able to churn out these smaller essays with relative ease, even though it was still annoying at that point.

Unfortunately, the stress didn’t end with completing the essays. I was pretty much down to the wire in completing them, and I still had to wait on getting the grades registered. I wrote e-mails to the professors in question, in which I politely explained that I really needed to get graded quick or I’d miss graduation and my head would explode. My e-mails worked, and I got my final missing grades with a whole couple of days to spare before the deadline for graduation.

I don’t recommend leaving things this late. It was nerve-wracking enough waiting for the grades to come in so I could get all my study modules registered, but few things in my life can match the utter horror that I experienced when I tried to sign up for graduation.

It started out innocently, if bureaucratically, enough. The way the sign up system works is that you get an official transcript of your studies, which shows all the courses you’ve done, how many credits they’re worth, etc. You then proceed to copy all of this information by hand onto the sign-up form. You then go to the faculty office, where the office clerk compares your sign-up sheet to your official transcript to make sure you copied it right. The point of this whole exercise is … still a mystery to me.

Anyway, I walked into the faculty office with my double- and triple-checked sign-up forms. I handed them to the office clerk and sat across from her biting my nails while she checked them. Everything was fine, I told myself. I had made sure that I had all the courses I needed, hadn’t I? Then, two noises that stopped my heart,

“Oh. Hmm.”

A pause, and then, “There seems to be a problem.”

Utter paralysis. I had to remind myself to breath.

The clerk referred to some small-print syllabus detail that no-one else I’ve spoken to has ever heard of. According to this detail, I had too many credits in my free studies category, so I couldn’t register them all. This meant that I didn’t have enough total credits to graduate. Having remembered to breath, I now had to keep myself from hyperventilating.

Luckily, a solution was found. In keeping with the approach embodied by the sign-up form merry-go-round, I ended up having to go to the English Department office, get them to rearrange how some of my English credits were registered and then run back to the faculty office before it closed to finish signing up for graduation. Getting my nerves back under control after all this took several strong drinks.

Then came a relatively anticlimactic wait for the graduation ceremony. The ceremony itself was an austere affair. The names of everyone who had graduated were read, and as the names were read, people went up to get their diplomas. After everyone got their diplomas, the dean gave a little speech and then, in a somewhat surreal move, sang a song. After that, a free drink from the faculty and that was that. University was over.

I have to admit that all the expectations I had invested into graduation left me feeling a little empty. I was fortunate to have a soft landing after graduation. I already had a job, and after graduating, my part-time contract got upgraded to a full-time contract. After that it’s been a steady nine-to-five with five weeks paid vacation a year. Am I happier now that I’m done with my thesis? In many ways, yes. Are there things I miss about university? Definitely. But if nothing else, I’m much happier being on this side of my thesis. The sun feels so much warmer when you’ve spent some time crawling through the crypt.

Technorati Tags: tales, crypt, gradu, thesis

BTSB proudly publishes the second installment in Juha Tupasela’s three-part series about writing your graduate thesis. It includes tips, tricks, and general observations made by a man who has gone into this certain type of hell and come back alive. You can read the first article here. Stayed tuned for the third and final installment coming soon (Honestly, I have it sitting in front of me).

Last October, I promised a Part II and even a Part III to my Tales from the Crypt post. Seeing as that was a year ago, it’s high time for me to deliver. Just to shoot down any suspicions that I’ve spent the time since last October collecting belly button lint, let me say that since the previous installment, I’ve completed my thesis, completed my master’s degree (which turned out not to be exactly the same thing), and started full-time employment (which at least partially explains the delay in part II being posted). If you’re working on your thesis right now or recently completed it, feel free to use the comments field to post your observations or vent your frustrations.

In the previous installment, I touched on the psychological phenomenon of thesis angst. Once the preparatory phase gave way to the actual writing process, a host of other psychological ticks and twitches bubbled to the surface. In hindsight, these can be loosely classified into a few psychological disorders.

1) Chronic life-skill deficiency
Because I was eager to finish my thesis, I took two months off work to finish writing it. I already had about half of a first draft in the form of my seminar paper, and was pretty confident that two months would be more than enough time to finish it off. Based on previous experience, I calculated that I would produce the first draft at a pace of 1,000–1,500 words per full day of writing, leaving plenty of time for my supervisor to give feedback and for me to make changes and finish off other school work that I had left hanging. This, as it turns out, was wishful thinking.

An output of 1,000–1,500 words a day is something I had previously been capable of, and I was so confident that I’d be able to maintain this pace (despite the warnings of friends) that I stuck a timetable on my wall showing where in the writing process I intended to be by when: draft of second chapter ready by the beginning of October, revised first chapter ready by mid-October, that sort of thing. This, of course, was just asking for trouble.
As further self-motivation I also tried to think about most of the other stuff in life (like going to a movie or a pub or the gym) as a reward for meeting my writing goals. What this meant was that, as I failed to meet my writing goals day after day, I increasingly spent my days beating my head on my desk trying to meet my goal of 1,000–1,500 words. The smartest thing I could have done when frustrated with my thesis would have been to turn off the computer and go lift weights or hit a punching bag or get drunk. Instead I just ran around and around in my own little vicious circle: because I hadn’t met my writing goals, I felt I couldn’t do anything else until I got back on track. This led to a condition where I had trouble enjoying myself at all. My thesis work was frustrating, and either I didn’t do fun things because I felt I hadn’t earned the right to, or I did do fun things and felt guilty doing them (which obviously made them less fun). My advice to those of you getting ready to write your thesis is to set a relatively unambitious daily writing goal, and when you get stuck, give yourself permission to do something else for a while. You and the people around you will be much happier, and assuming you do keep writing at some pace, you’ll end up finishing your thesis anyway.

2) Pathological fecal identification syndrome
Closely related to chronic life-skill deficiency, this syndrome manifests itself as the unshakable belief that all the time and effort you have put into your thesis has produced nothing better than a large, slightly runny pile of poop, steaming defiantly on your desk. I was often left with the feeling that the result would have been better had I just beat my head on my keyboard instead of on my desk. Needless to say, writing what seems to be complete crap in addition to not writing as much of it as you had intended can only make a grim mental outlook even worse. The only treatment I know for this disorder is to chant “I can fix it in the second draft” to oneself over and over and over, until the steady drone drowns out all doubts and anxieties.

3) Obsessive textual separation anxiety
This is a fear of losing the text one has written to computer failure, natural disasters, or acts of God. The fear leads to excessive saving, that is, after every few words, and to the making of more backup copies than one could ever reasonably need. Case in point: when I was done banging my head on my desk and/or keyboard for the day, I would first save my work on a backup USB stick, then I would send it to a total of three separate e-mail accounts, my university account, my internet service provider account, and my work account. My logic behind this was that if all of these backup copies were destroyed, Western society would be collapsing all around me, and completing my thesis would probably be the least of my troubles.

The Eureka Moment
No, this is not the title to a bad sci-fi novel. It’s proof that the subconscious exists and can even help you out from time to time. After the frustration of churning out my thesis text and the struggling to try and make it not suck, I reached a point where I had enough text, but wasn’t sure how it all fit together. My eureka moment happened when, in desperation, I started writing an email to my supervisor explaining where I was having trouble. As I was writing the email, the pieces of the thesis started to fall into place: of course that chapter is really about X and the next chapter logically focuses of Y, and that annoying theme I couldn’t seem to fit anywhere actually connects the two. Wow. What had started out as a cry for help ended up as the solution for banging my thesis paper into something recognizable as a thesis and completing my first full draft. For the first time in a long time, I could see myself actually finishing the thing. It was a beautiful moment. Though there was still plenty of writing and editing to do, after this moment I had a clear picture in my head of what I was working towards. Instead of being lost in the crypt, I could see daylight and was making my way towards it with a vengeance.

Technorati Tags: tales, crypt, gradu, thesis

Yes, it has finally come to this. After a month and a half of solid typing and retyping, my pallid complexion and hunched shoulders leave little room for speculation, I’m locked in the crypt with my master’s thesis, and the only way out is through.

Despite the title, the last thing anyone needs is a horror story. The thesis is a big enough bogey man for most students already. The point of these posts is to share some of my experiences of writing my thesis, and (hopefully) coming out the other end, sanity intact, diploma in hand. Maybe these posts will give people whose thesis is ahead of them some idea of what they’re in for and help them avoid some of my mistakes. Maybe people in the midst of the process themselves will be able to draw some consolation from the fact that they’re not alone. Maybe this just seems like a more productive form of procrastination than spending my time on Facebook. You be the judge.

It all started about two years ago. Back then, my master’s thesis seemed distant and almost mythical, something mentioned in hushed tones if at all, something not entirely of this world. Now that I’m approaching the end of the process, my picture of it is somewhat more down-to-earth. I now know that the actual work involved is a relatively minor challenge compared to the psychological dimension of the project. All of the time I spent trying to convince myself that the thesis isn’t really all that (one of my favorite mantras having been “it’s really only two proseminar papers stuck together”) only served to convince my subconscious that the thesis really must be all that after all.

The author, hard at work on his thesis

As I see it now, the whole thing boils down to three major psychological hurdles: (1) coming to terms with the fact that, no, pretending the thesis doesn’t exist won’t make it go away, and I might as well pick a topic; (2) accepting the grim truth that I’m going to have to do a lot of reading, so much, in fact, that I’m going to have to take proper notes to keep track of everything; and (3) sitting down in front of that horrid blinking cursor to actually write the damn thing. This installment of Tales from the Crypt (or TFTC, since this publication is into acronyms) focuses on the first two.

The first hurdle was the easiest. When I realized I would be taking a seminar the next year, I started to formulate a plan of attack. I had no intention of trying to revolutionize anything with my thesis, but I didn’t want to do something completely off-the-shelf either. Maybe foolishly, I felt that my thesis should on some level reflect who I am. After all, it would supposedly be the crowning achievement of the six-plus years of intellectual growth and/or alcoholism of my university experience.

The criteria for my topic were that I wanted to combine my studies in postcolonial literature with my hobby of reading science fiction. I didn’t, however, want to write on any of my favorite books, because I was afraid that the dissection I would have to subject them to for my thesis would end up killing the pleasure of just reading them. With some much appreciated help from my advisor-to-be, I settled on an author I hadn’t heard of, whose work lent itself well to my project, thus both expanding my horizons and sparing myself from reducing my favorite books into a figurative pile of dismembered limbs and goo.

There are many books available on the process of writing a thesis. Many of them are filled with metaphors and pictures meant to please the eye and break the thesis-writing process down into edible chunks for hapless students (one of the most memorable of these describes reasoning as the shish kebab that pierces through all the chunks of meat that make up the thesis). The one that best describes my experience, though, is the amoeba. When I got started, I had a lot of trouble getting my thoughts straight. My ideas were all over the place, and I had no idea how they fit together. My project was like a huge amoeba: interesting to look at from a distance, but ultimately just a shapeless blob.

The background reading I was doing didn’t really help the situation, as everything I was reading just seemed to open up new possibilities—adding pseudopodia to my amoeba, as it were, rather than cutting it down to size. Of course, another problem was that I didn’t always dig into the background material I gathered from the libraries, Nelli, or Amazon (.co.uk, to save on shipping) when I got my hands on it. Too often, when I came across a useful article, book, or other source, I placed it on my shelf, happy to see my pile of reference material growing. Of course, the really useful stuff was the material I got around to reading last.

Once I started really doing the reading, I realized the importance of something that I’ve never actually been taught to do properly: note taking. Maybe I’m just the only idiot in town who doesn’t instinctively know how to take good notes, but when I was getting started I was pretty hopeless at it, and ended up redoing a bunch of my early notes, listening to my inner voice call me nasty names for not doing things right the first time.

By far the worst part of the early stages of the project (and the late stages, for that matter) was that my thesis was always on my mind on some level. No matter what I was doing—work, other courses, whatever—the thesis was always there, haunting me in its incompletion. I always felt I should have been using more time for my thesis. Nothing seemed to get done as quickly as I wanted it to get done, and what I had left to do always seemed so much bigger than what I had actually done. Naturally, the more I worried about it, the more I procrastinated, leading to a neat little vicious circle.

I don’t want to leave you with the idea that doing research was all bad, though. Background reading, while sometimes leading to frustration and pulled-out hair, has taught me a great deal of interesting stuff that I would have never thought to read up on otherwise. I’ve read about the history of utopian writing in science fiction, the history of slavery in the Caribbean, the characteristics of Haitian Vodou, and the sexual dimensions of the zombie myth. Not everything I’ve read is going in the final product, but it’s definitely opened up a new part of the world to me.

In Part II, I’ll talk about the writing process itself. Until then, why don’t you share some of your experiences, fears, or observations of picking a thesis topic and doing research in the comments section? If group therapy works for severe psychological disorders, it might just work for thesis-angst as well.

Technorati Tags: tales, crypt, gradu, thesis