57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School by Kevin D. Haggerty & Aaron Doyle

Author:Kevin D. Haggerty & Aaron Doyle [Haggerty, Kevin D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226281063
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

32

Cover Everything

Students eager to screw up should remember that their thesis is their defining personal and professional achievement. The thesis is everything. Therefore it should contain everything. Approach your topic from every conceivable angle. Use a diverse set of methodologies. Explore the topic from every theoretical framework conceivable. Aim to produce an analysis that spans the full sweep of human history. This will ensure that in thirty years you will be asking whether you are eligible for pension benefits as a graduate student.

While working on my master’s degree, I bumped into one of my professors and summarized my thesis topic for him. I was doing research on the sex trade, so I detailed how I expected to conduct a feminist analysis of prostitution in Toronto. It would address economic issues and incorporate recent theoretical work on ethnicity and identity. My methodology involved an ambitious plan for a lengthy period of firsthand observation in the field, combined with dozens of interviews with female street prostitutes, police, politicians, and local activists. When I stopped talking, he smiled wryly and said, “Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you.” As we parted, I thought to myself, He’s right. This is insane. I will never be able to do all of this. The project was massive, unfocused, and had to be radically reduced in scope and ambition or I would never finish. I slept horribly that night, but my fear motivated me to transform my thesis into something more feasible.

Both master’s and PhD students tend to set overly ambitious parameters for their research, mistakenly thinking their thesis has to be a monumental contribution to knowledge. The thesis is the focal point of a graduate degree. As a result, it has tremendous symbolic weight, making it tempting to try to cover more than necessary, and to do so from all angles. This is a particular danger for master’s students, who are expected to make a much more modest contribution to knowledge but are still tempted to use the thesis to demonstrate everything they know about a topic. Be cautious that you do not try to accomplish too much. If you think you must address everything in your thesis, you risk producing a needlessly long, rambling piece of work.

Some universities try to curtail this impulse by imposing strict word limits on thesis. Still, I have seen 250-page master’s theses and a PhD thesis that at more than 700 pages could only be bound as two separate volumes. Such massive tomes might impress or intimidate junior grad students, but faculty members see them as a disaster. Lengthy theses almost always represent some combination of an unfocused student and a supervisor who could not (or did not try to) convince the student to narrow the scope of her project.

The history of conflict in the Middle East, for example, is not a PhD thesis; it is several lifetimes’ work. Alternatively, a study of the political implications of chariot warfare in Mesopotamia is still a large project, but it is a more focused and manageable PhD thesis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.