The first snow of my Freshman year. Photo Credit: Sara Bell.
After a couple months of light and mounting panic, I settled on a thesis topic. I’m now thrilled I chose this topic—it’s been particularly fun and interesting to write about—but I really struggled to get to it. There’s a few things I wish I had spent more time thinking about before I was in the thick of the fall semester, trying to handle the academic reflection that a thesis needs at the same time as midterms hit. So if you’re thinking about possibly writing a thesis next year, or the deadline is approaching and you’re in the same boat as I was, I’d recommend trying out a few things.
The first question I wish I had asked myself earlier is simple: why do you want to write a thesis? In my case, I wanted experience fulfilling exactly the terms of the English Senior Essay: writing a piece of original literary criticism of a sizable length. I also wanted experience conducting independent research, and more generally, I wanted to embark on an academic project of some sort. I used to write for The Eye, Spectator’s magazine, and I missed the feeling of extended research and writing, particularly the kind where you do it purely because you think it’s interesting. There’s no reason to spend hours counting which local businesses have recently closed unless you think it’s important and worth thinking hard about, and the same goes for a project like a thesis.
Getting a sense of why you’re writing might not have much to do with a specific topic. (If it does: congrats! You’re already well on your way!) If you read my above reasons again, they could easily apply to Afrofuturism or apostasy. What they did confirm for me, though, was that I wanted specifically to write about something that already felt urgent to me. It’s probably good advice in general to not pick a thesis topic you know very little about, but if you’re going to do that, you should probably be wanting to write a thesis so that you can experiment in a new field. (You should also probably start doing your research earlier, well before your proposal deadline.) It also confirmed for me that I cared not just about the text I would be analyzing but also about whether the issues within and surrounding that text felt pressing to me.
If you have a sense of what you want to get out of the thesis and how that frames the kinds of questions you’re going to ask, you might try starting with the bigger questions. How have people thought about gender in religion? How have stateless people formed communities? Why do we regulate labor the way we do? These questions could lead you to something from your coursework that you remember standing out. Or you could start with specific work from courses and zoom back out. Does that play about fairies or that book you read on policing make you want to just read more about it? That could be a good place to start thinking.