Thinking through the thesis process. Photo credit: Elia Zhang.
Every department goes through the senior thesis process differently. Some have their students complete a thesis in junior year, some require 4 semesters of continuous work. In this article, I would like to share how my thesis idea has evolved, and the personal growth that this learning process has enabled.
For people who have double majors, the first question we need to figure out is in which department to do a thesis. For most departments at Columbia College, the policy does not allow students to do a “joint thesis” that can be applied to two majors. And after speaking with professors whom I have reached out to during junior spring, I have discovered that the general consensus is that it is not advisable to write two theses at the same time, given the amount of work involved, and the need to cultivate or finetune a new skill set. (However, if you are passionate about two questions that require different methodologies to find out their answers, you should definitely try pushing the limit and figuring out a way of navigating two thesis ideas!)
As a double major in philosophy and history, the process behind deciding what area I would focus on for my thesis was itself a process of learning about what is going on in my fields at the moment. I started thinking about my thesis topic last spring, as a junior, mostly through chatting about my wide-ranging interests with professors. I knew I was always interested in the approach of transcultural or translingual studies, which is a field that is starting to emerge within the humanities. In terms of subject matter, poetry is my long-time passion. I first thought about the idea of doing a philosophy thesis on what poetry is, with a focus on French poets during the Symbolism movement, and putting them in conversation with philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger. However, after hearing about my interests, my professor urged me to think more broadly about the history of the growth of aesthetics as a subfield of philosophy, and about the main problems that philosophers face today, which include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the history of philosophy.
I spent the summer reviewing the materials that have prompted my question about how to conceptualize poetry and how translingual practices could reveal its nature. During this reflection process, I thought back to a term paper that I did for a history seminar back in the fall semester of my junior year, during which I researched the archives that contained the notes that Ezra Pound used to rewrite ancient Sinitic poems into English. Pound’s Cathay is to me an exemplary work of translingual practice, as demonstrated in the complicated layers of (re)interpretations behind its publication: it went from ancient Chinese, to Japanese, to word-for-word translation in English, and finally to poems rewritten in English. Yet because of the scope and the interdisciplinary nature of my topic, it has been challenging to find faculty mentors who specifically work in this field. Not wanting to give up on an idea I had found so interesting, I reached out to the director of undergraduate studies at the history department in the fall, who was very helpful in terms of guiding me through the thesis application process. The experience of explaining my research interest to potential faculty advisors forced me to communicate in the most concise way possible what my project entailed–a process that itself allowed me to hone in on my research question more precisely.
The most exciting day that I have had in the process of preparing my research was the day when I spoke to Professor Casey Blake, who has now become my Second Reader. Not only did he show a genuine interest in my topic, but he has helped me contextualize my work within historical studies, and the value of examining intellectual and poetic exchange between the US and East Asia. The fact that this field is emerging is what makes it exciting. I feel grateful to have received confirmation from senior scholars, which has allowed me to see my very specific, and sometimes personal interest as an empowering contribution within the larger context of the field.