Down to the Wire: Last Minute Tales of Thesis Trauma

With their deadlines rapidly approaching, it's crunch time for seniors writing theses. But even as thesis season reaches its climax, with History and Literature theses due last Monday and most departments' due dates before spring break, seniors are adding color to their lives--with highlighters and color-coded page tabs.

"When we [seniors] see each other we talk about two things: what we're doing next year or our thesis," says Jobe G. Danganan '99, a social studies concentrator writing a thesis on Christianity, racism and racial reconciliation of the African-American experience from the 1960s to the 1990s. "We call it the T-word or the T-bird."

As their journeys come to a close, many thesis-writing seniors sagely offer advice to their classmates who are considering taking on the thesis challenge, and also to those seniors who face several weeks until their concentration's thesis deadline.

While the thesis process occupies a large portion of senior year, students considering writing theses should start planning far in advance of their senior fall, according to many veterans of the process. One way to prepare for writing a thesis is getting a head start on applications for grants from the Student Employment Office's Harvard College Research Program.

Danganan says he wishes he took core classes earlier and saved less work-intensive classes for this semester. With core workloads, Rhodes scholarship interviews (he was a finalist), LSATs, GREs and recruiting in the fall, Danganan says finding time to work on his thesis was especially difficult, and he would have benefited from advance planning of LSAT dates and classes.

"I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel now, but I'm sure I'll get there," he says.

Rebecca A. Berman '99, an Afro-American studies concentrator writing her thesis about a New York minority education program called Prep for Prep, stresses the importance of a good advisor. "I feel like people's theses are made or broken by their thesis experience," she says.

During the process of researching and writing a thesis, social anthropology concentrator Stanley C. Wei '99 prescribes a regular schedule of waking, sleeping and exercising.

Wei, who is writing his thesis about the correlation between poverty and poor health in immigrant women, adds that organization is the key to lowering the risk of thesis trauma. He color codes all his materials--during his first reading, he highlights or uses adhesive page markers in one color; when he reevaluates it for a specific chapter, he uses a different color to distinguish between interesting and pertinent information.

Wei also recommends including ideas that seem irrelevant to the thesis during initial drafts because they could be pertinent if the writer unexpectedly reformulates the paper.

To maintain a train of thought, he says thesis writers should leave themselves notes when they want to refer to an article, instead of stopping their writing to look back through dozens of volumes.

Then again, it's not just diligent note taking and precise highlighting that lead a thesis writer to success. More unconventional tactics can calm a senior's mind in the face of pressure and make the process run more smoothly.

Wei says he has tested the benefits of combining alcohol and academics, writing his thesis while drinking a beer. Anna M. Harr '99, a women's studies concentrator, bought children's flip sunglasses with fish-shaped lenses, which she dons when she works on her thesis.

"It's hard to be too stressed out when I'm wearing something that silly," Harr wrote in an e-mail message. "It's hard to retain much of a sense of humor when you spend a good portion of the day staring at a laptop."

And thesis writers say it's not just stacks of books, interviews, experiments and pages and pages of writing that they learn from while writing a thesis.

Seniors complement their learning about their thesis topics with other benefits, citing camaraderie among thesis writers, the pride of completing a thesis, and knowledge about how to work efficiently as additional advantages to their research and writing.

The thesis writer is not the only one who learns from the experience. Bridget N. Terry, associate director of undergraduates in the economic department and teaching fellow of a section for thesis-writers, says thesis advisors learn from the process as well.

"Sometimes [advising] points out to me mistakes I don't want to make in my own work--it's hard to see that in your own work, it's easier to see it in someone else's. I see a lot of interesting ideas and I learn from their mistakes and their successes," Terry says.

Even careful advising and a Sam Adams do not necessarily relieve the pressure of the extraordinary demands of writing a thesis. Inspiration and excitement are balanced with printer failure and paper requirements.

"Sometimes it's really fun and interesting and you feel like a scholar," Berman says. "Other times I think, 'Why did I possibly decide to do this? It was a terrible idea.'"

Wei says students who bind their theses have encountered the unexpected problem of setting different margins for left and right pages. Because of the placement of the binding, odd and even numbered pages must have different margin settings.

All theses must be written on acid-free paper, and some concentrations have a requirement for paper weight, to ensure that the summa cum laude and magna cum laude theses archived in Pusey Library do not disintegrate.

Thesis writers not only suffer from mental stress, but also find their hard work physically taxing, with many developing repetitive stress injury.

Berman already has a thesis horror story. She contracted mononucleosis before a scheduled research trip to New York she had been planning for six months, and could only stay awake for the length of each interview.

Seniors and faculty advisors stress that students need to weigh pros and cons before making the monumental decision of writing a thesis.

"It's not something to do just if you want honors," Terry says. "When you're up at three o'clock in the morning two weeks before the thesis is done under all this stress, the desire to get honors is not going to be the thing to push you through. You really have to have the desire to get the answer to your question."