Photo Credit: Columbia School of Professional Studies
Most of the people in my life tend to be a bit surprised to learn that I’m not writing a thesis. After all, I write a blog that talks about research on campus, and it’s frequently assumed that an interest in research must mean an interest in writing a thesis. In fact, research and theses are so tied together that I’m not the only CC research ambassador to write about this subject— Isabel Wong wrote a beautiful piece on her decision to ultimately write a thesis. I spent the past year going back and forth on the idea of committing myself to this academic milestone. But every time I got close to deciding on doing a thesis, the time commitment spooked me. Prior to writing this piece I spoke to some of my friends who are writing a thesis. One friend estimated that he was spending 20 hours a week on his thesis. Another speculated that they were spending anywhere from 17 – 25 hours a week.
I changed my career path pretty late in the game, only deciding to pursue public policy in the middle of my junior year. That’s a much more limited number of semesters to pursue internships and gain work experience than most students are working with. And the last thing I would want to do is to overburden myself by writing a thesis and also conducting an internship. To me, it was more valuable to do an internship than to write a thesis.
I had a pretty strong justification for why I didn’t want to write a thesis. But even with this strong justification in my head, I struggled with the imposter syndrome I dealt with. When people asked me if I was writing a thesis, I felt compelled to explain my entire thought-process to every poor stranger, almost as if apologizing for my decision. I felt a little bit like a fraud— was I really writing a research blog yet not completing what many consider to be the capstone of undergraduate research? Could I truly call myself a researcher without completing a thesis? And then there was the fear that I would lose all of the personal connections I had made with my professors because they were too busy caring about the students for whom they were serving as thesis advisors.
I still occasionally have moments of fear and regret. There are still moments of jealousy when I see my friends committing themselves to this one project that’s tangible proof of the things that they have learned and the way that they have grown as students. But then I also think of my friends who have taken this semester off to go work on political campaigns, and how they’re applying the values they’ve learned throughout the course of college to go and dedicate themselves to improving our country. I think of the friends who spent the time and effort to learn and educate themselves regarding social justice issues during the course of college. And then I think of myself and the academic journey I have taken as a Columbia student— from walking in not knowing what I wanted to do, to becoming a pre-med student, to becoming a public health student, and then ultimately to my focus on policy. When I think of my internship, an internship that would’ve seemed laughable to me just two years ago, I see it not just as a job but as a representation of the growth and progress I have made throughout college. I see it as the result of me spending long hours trying to figure out what I wanted out of life and what I wanted my mark to be. I see it in the same light as many researchers see their theses: evidence that they are thinkers, and a sign of their growth over the arc of their undergraduate career. And then those fears and regrets, they all disappear.