Why writing a thesis (sort of) makes sense

We’re all nuts. Absolutely, positively bonkers. That’s the only explanation. Why else would anyone choose to spend Senior Spring (or their entire senior year in many cases) writing a thesis? We don’t have to do it. We don’t get paid to do it. We sacrifice our social lives in order to do it. It’s basically the antithesis to every senior’s dream of spending long afternoons on the Green and long nights inside frat basements. If you enjoy padding your resume in your spare time, the idea of graduating with honors in a specific major provides some incentive. But even that isn’t technically guaranteed. So really, we must all be nuts.

But being nuts isn’t a bad thing. The intellectual energy that thesis-writers bring to the campus environment is actually quite refreshing. I’m obviously biased (and probably overly-enthusiastic since I’m DONE!), but I think the thesis experience is one of Dartmouth’s finest academic offerings. Every thesis writer has to pick a subject he or she is passionate about, analyze it in a new way, and present his or her findings to the public. The whole process involves absurd amounts of thinking, reading, and questioning the world, and the end result is a unique contribution of knowledge to the academia. It’s actually pretty amazing.

Of course, most students that choose to write theses wouldn’t consider the decision or the process amazing. Students tend to write theses because they are genuinely interested in a subject and have been for a while. It’s as simple as that. In fact, my own decision to write a thesis was really a non-decision. I had been working in the same plant genetics lab for four years, and it just seemed natural to wrap it all up by compiling my research into a giant manuscript. If you’ve started the work, you might as well finish it.

Finishing it tends to be the biggest challenge though, as many of us know. Inevitably we run out of time and have to leave things out, and let’s face it, that bothers the perfectionist in each of us. This is especially true in the sciences. At some point you have to stop doing work in the lab and start writing, but sometimes it’s hard to draw that line. I spent my whole year trying to finish an experiment only to realize in April that it wouldn’t be ready. The damn plants took too long to grow, and I had to scrap all that work and fall back on data I had from previous years. Talk about frustrating.

Weekly discussions with advisors and last minute scrambles add to the frustration. No matter how hard you try to stay on top of everything, there will always be something you’ve overlooked, and when you realize that for the fifteenth time in two days, it can be a little unsettling. My advisor loves to tell me how one of his honors students once kicked him in the shin because she was so upset. Thank goodness he thought it was funny. Pent up emotions can be dangerous.

Still, a little stress is a good thing. I hate myself for saying it, but it’s true. While a thesis shouldn’t make life miserable, it should stretch your comfort zone. That’s the only way we learn, and I certainly learned a lot in a few panicked nights. Besides, what’s the fun in repeating the same old routine? Working really hard makes the end product more meaningful, and finishing more of a relief. And relief is a good thing. Especially for seniors. The thought of going back to do some more work on that thesis can get you across the Commencement stage faster than you could have imagined. Goodbye Dartmouth!!!

Yet despite all the hardship, writing a thesis tends to be a positive experience. My thesis defense was one of my best experiences at Dartmouth. Being able to share my work with an auditorium full of friends and colleagues was truly exhilarating. For the first time, I was able to see my whole Dartmouth support network in front of me, and the sense of community and belonging it gave me was indescribable. Fortunately, the embarrassing pictures my advisor presented as an introduction to my talk did little to change that—although I could have done without the one of me in the jungle posed seductively in my field gear; you’d think professors would have better judgment. Everything went quite smoothly.

The sense of accomplishment you feel seeing the final version of your thesis is immeasurable. Having a bound version in your hand makes all the hard work tangible. Of course, I won’t deny that writing a thesis can sometimes provide other tangible bonuses. While it certainly isn’t an expectation that an undergraduate thesis will become a published work, it’s definitely a possibility. I will (hopefully) be lucky enough to have at least one paper come out of my research, and although I am not pursuing a career in plant genetics, being published as an undergraduate can still help me get into graduate programs in ecology. And even if it doesn’t, having something published makes me feel like a real scientist.

More than that though, the simple (or complicated) experience of writing a thesis is valuable in and of itself. For those of us that would like to continue in academia, the undergraduate honors thesis provides a sneak-peek into the future and gives us the chance to see how nerdy we actually are. (I actually rank pretty high on that scale.) For the rest of us, it provides closure to a crazy undergraduate career and allows us to walk away satisfied with what we’ve accomplished. Regardless of where we end up though, writing a thesis prepares us for the next step.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that we’re nuts. I’ve already established that. But hopefully it changes the way we think about ourselves as a community. We complain that we’re apathetic and uninformed up here in the woods, but it’s simply not true. We’re actually pretty active learners, at least when it comes to writing theses. The accusations that Dartmouth students are not intellectual are unfounded. Just because we know how to have a good time doesn’t mean that we don’t think seriously about the world around us. The mere existence of the undergraduate thesis is proof that we do plenty of thinking up here in Hanover. Like everything else though, we just love to pretend that it’s no big deal. Even when the page count hits 100.