The Thesis Puzzle

Writing a thesis is often billed as the capstone undergraduate experience, a long-term project meant to top off four years of study and allow students to try their hand at a chosen discipline.

“It teaches an intensity of intellectual focus,” said Peter B. Machinist ’66, director of undergraduate studies for Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, who wrote an undergraduate thesis himself. “It allows you to see what it means to take on a project that has some heft to it. This is a kind of skill that will serve you all your life.”

But while it may cap senior year, much of the thesis-writing process, a task undertaken by about half of each graduating class, is left to chance.

Some students are advised by senior faculty, others by graduate students. Some concentrations teach the senior tutorial as a course with regular meeting times and loose assignments; others leave students to shape their work more autonomously. In some concentrations, advisers grade the thesis; in others, theses are read “blind” by professors, lecturers, or graduate students less familiar with the thesis writer’s work and topic.

For seniors, these disparities often add frustrations to an already daunting process—and in some cases, hamper recognition of their work.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

Nowhere are these differences more evident than in advising. Rules vary among departments about how a student should find an adviser, who the adviser should be, and what role the department will play in shaping the relationship.

Most concentrations leave students to seek out an adviser on their own, a process that requires them to bounce from one office hours to another, peddling their idea. (Or as Jeffrey Miron, the director of undergraduate studies for economics, put it, “the system is self-motivated and decentralized—like much in economics.”) For those without pre-existing relationships with professors (most small classes are taken during junior and senior years, especially in large departments), the prospect of finding an adviser can be especially daunting.

But in some concentrations, including philosophy, history of science, and history and literature, the head of undergraduate studies plays matchmaker between students and professors, assigning advisers based on their interests and expertise. All of these concentrations ranked in the top 11 this year in terms of concentration satisfaction in The Crimson’s senior survey. Last year’s survey showed similar results.

Economics is one of the few departments to require its students to receive help from a professor. Students in the sciences often interact most with postdocs, rather than full professors. Even small departments, such as Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, sometimes scramble to find advisers due to imbalances between students’ interests and professors’ expertise.

“It’s not clear that advising theses is a clear component of faculty responsibility,” said Sociology Head Tutor Jason A. Kaufman ’93. “You’re basically just volunteering your time.”

Professors receive no formal recognition for their work on theses, meaning that apart from the pleasure of teaching—something that shouldn’t be discounted—there is little incentive for faculty to advise them. While department heads sometimes recommend graduate students over professors, saying that they can devote more time to students, it’s unlikely that graduate students, who TF classes and are writing their own dissertations, are sitting on their hands. If they’re better advisers, it’s because they feel a greater sense of responsibility to students.

EYES WIDE SHUT

One way to provide quality control would be to offer teaching credits or financial compensation to faculty members who advise theses. (Graduate students receive some compensation—about $3,000 per student.) But students say they see a role for departments to step in to standardize and enforce guidelines and expectations.

“The senior tutorial leaves too much up to chance. I think it’s a problem of instead of having it be an entirely independent relationship between the student and the professor, it needs to be more imposed from the department,” said Jeremy R. Steinemann ’08, a romance languages and literature concentrator who dropped his thesis at the beginning of spring semester. “I was like a kid in the backyard—no one was watching.”

Almost all departments require a first chapter to be completed by the end of the first semester of senior year. But apart from this initial step, departmental guidelines range widely.

In molecular and cellular biology, students must submit a proposal to the department over the summer before getting the formal go-ahead. In history and literature, a committee looks over each student’s proposal and bibliography early in the year, providing written comments to the adviser. The history department, which had eight Hoopes Prize winners this year, requires its students to enroll in History 99, a small class that meets every two to three weeks. “I would be willing to guess we’re the most structured of any of the departments in the College,” said History’s Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies Adam G. Beaver ’00.

A JUST REWARD?

Finding an adviser and getting departmental help can often make the most difference—and not simply in terms of personal satisfaction.

Hoopes Prizes, awarded annually to about 80 students and advisers for excellent writing and research, routinely go to theses advised by members of Harvard’s senior faculty. Winners receive a $3,500 prize.

This year, 60 percent of the winning theses (51 of 83) were drawn from the senior faculty. In 2007, 40 of the 77 awards followed the same pattern.

Hoopes Prize winner Elizabeth B. David ’08 said she credited her adviser, history professor David R. Armitage, “100 percent” for her success. “He pushed me to find the argument, to pull out my own ideas and not bury them in historiography,” she said.

Yet a Hoopes Prize is hardly an ideal measurement of a successful thesis. Students in concentrations like MCB, many of whom work on thesis research in labs at the Medical School, are at a disadvantage, since their advisers may be unfamiliar with the prize. Science concentrations also tend to have later due dates, meaning that a thesis could remain unfinished when nominations are asked for. Often graders read outside their home discipline, making professors feel unqualified judges of the scholarship.

“I can’t say that it’s the perfect way of evaluating theses,” Kaufman said. “I doubt anybody would claim that.”