Reflections after doing my master’s thesis
Three things I learned from my experience.
I wanted to share some of my experiences from doing my master’s thesis. I hope that it can be of use to someone who is about to embark on the same journey or facing the same struggles as I did.
1. Sometimes you have to restructure your process to make progress.
When I broke down my thesis into parts, I thought that I would start with the theory chapter. It felt like the logical choice, as it made up the foundation of my work and would force me to explain the topics I would touch upon throughout the thesis in case I did not fully understand them.
An unexpected challenge was that I quickly became bogged down with writing the theory correctly and comprehensively as I didn’t want to exclude important theory but at the same time I didn’t see the need to starting at “Adam and Eve” as my supervisor put it. This felt somewhat overwhelming because 1) it felt like wasted work to write something that would potentially later be thrown away and 2) writing theory can be truly daunting - at least for me - if you have to double and triple check every little detail to make sure that what you are writing is in line with how other people understand the topic.
What fixed the writing issue for me was writing down the methods and results first. In my case, it ended up being a sort of journal of “these were the tools I used and these are the results I got,” which I did not have to double-check since it was entirely based on my own work. This allowed me to find out what theory I needed to introduce earlier in the report to have a coherent structure. That made a huge difference in my writing experience!
2. Trust your supervisor’s intuition during hard times.
Undoubtedly, there will be difficult times. It will be tempting to take shortcuts that seem like good ideas in the short term, but will likely cause harm in the long term.
During my thesis work, I had an experience where I had been working on a paper for some time and started to feel a bit tired of it. I had corresponded with the paper’s author via email and had arranged a Zoom meeting with him. At one point, I felt that continuing with that particular paper was a bit boring, and the problems I faced seemed like dead ends. I mentioned to my supervisor that I wanted to deviate a bit, which I acknowledged felt a bit risky, but I was ready to dive into something new. On my supervisor’s recommendation, I waited for the Zoom call with the paper’s author, and it cleared up some of the dead ends, giving me a push in the right direction.
So, express your uncertainties and thoughts to your supervisor. They likely have an intuition about what to do when those thoughts and feelings arise from their years of experience in academia.
3. Reaching out seems scary, but is actually fun and rewarding.
Prior to my master’s thesis, I worked on another project with my thesis supervisor. He encouraged me to contact the authors of a paper whose results I attempted to reproduce. At first, I was skeptical, but I went ahead and contacted them. My skepticism ultimately came from a place of insecurity about why those researchers would spend their time with a “silly little” master’s student from the other side of the planet. However, they answered and were enthusiastic about my interest. They showed me some of their newer research, which inspired more additions to my project, making it all the more interesting.
What I took away from this experience is that people are just people. Even though they have their name on a fancy-looking piece of paper and are admittedly much smarter than yourself, they are still just people who have jumped into the same rabbit hole of research due to a sincere interest in whatever field you are researching. If they have the time, they are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about people taking an interest in their research.
During my master’s thesis, I did more or less the same thing. I found a paper that looked at some of the same topics I would be investigating during my project and based much of the foundational work on what they had done. It turned out that some assistance and clarification were often needed to properly replicate the work, as details were often left out for better or worse. So, I reached out to the first author of the paper again. This led to many emails and a Zoom call where we discussed details that I might have overlooked otherwise.