Mission Control - writing a Harvard thesis

Perusing my bookmarks on thesis assistance, I found a few gems of advice in Dartmouth’s page on thesis advice - nothing startling but sometimes forgotten in the fog of the process and worth repeating (in chronological order, starting with the beginning of the effort):

• You will want, in six months’ time, to feel as if you know just about everything about your topic.

• Understand that your topic will only seem bigger once you get into your research. If your topic is interesting and rich, new issues and new ideas will always emerge, so, focus your ideas tightly as soon as you are able. If you can’t summarize your argument in a single paragraph, your topic is too big.

• Perhaps the most useful tip we can give you is to write all through the research process. As you read, take notes. You should begin drafting perhaps even before you finish your preliminary research. The writing process itself will help you to answer some of your questions and figure out where you need to do more research. One student notes that “Most ideas won’t coalesce just by reading without writing.”

• Taming “the Beast”. Many students think of a thesis as just a really big paper. But while the sheer bulk of the project is overwhelming, the nature of the thesis is actually more complex than a matter of size. As one student put it, “There is absolutely no comparison at all between even a 30 page research paper and ‘The Beast.’
  There are few “tricks” to tame the “thesis beast”. Break your thesis up into smaller components of things “to do” and things “to say”. Your “to do” plan is your list of tasks: meetings with professors, due dates, books you need to read, articles you need to find, and so on. Your “to say” plan is your list of argumentative goals for your thesis - what your points are and how you plan to make them.If your “to say” plan starts to look unwieldy, think of each chapter of your thesis as a course paper with its own discreet argument.

• The worst parts about writing a thesis:

1) “I’m sure you’ll have a moment when you’re editing one small part of one chapter and you’ll stop and can’t even remember what you thesis is, and you’ll realize that you’re so (immersed) that you’ve lost the big picture. It can be real drudgery at times.”

2) “The time. There’s not enough of it, and the added burden of classes (a job, a family, etc.) makes life tough.”

3) “It’s hanging over you (all the time). Even if you are right on schedule, the thesis is not like an exam or a paper that is over and done with at the end of the term. Until you turn it in, it’s always there waiting for you.”

To end on a positive note, the upsides:

1) it’s a substantial body of work that’s all yours

2) working with a great thesis director

3) character-building. Takes more than ’smarts’ to complete a thesis.