There is something immensely satisfying about great struggles coming to an end. In 1781, the Battle of Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War, securing our independence. In 1945, the Allies achieved victory in the war against the murderous, tyrannical regimes of Germany and Japan. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
Today at noon, another struggle comes to an end: I (along with many other history majors) will have handed in the final copy of my senior honors thesis in history. True, it may not have been an “epic” struggle in the conventional sense, but it did require plenty of “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
(Okay, maybe the blood part is a bit of an exaggeration, although I do seem to remember getting a paper cut.)
Since this is the time when a lot of juniors will be thinking about whether or not they want to write an honors thesis, I thought that I might use my column to dispense some words of wisdom. Deciding to write an honors thesis has consequences that are not to be taken lightly.
First of all, an honors thesis is a lot of work. Depending on your major, your thesis will be different lengths. Some of my friends studying foreign languages have written theses of about 50 pages. An economics major I know has a thesis of only 25 pages, 15 of which are appendices. My history thesis is about 115 pages. But the length of the thesis is deceptive: papers in the social or natural sciences will invariably be shorter than papers in the humanities, but they are all labor-intensive.
Writing a thesis quite clearly has an opportunity cost. Different departments award different numbers of credit-hours for thesis work, but the bottom line is the same: you will be able to take fewer other classes, and will have to devote a substantial amount of your free time to research.
Also, an honors thesis doesn’t make a good topic for conversation. My thesis is a comparative study in intellectual history on German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and the Scottish Enlightenment. And since most people haven’t heard of either, it’s not much of an ice-breaker.
That being said, there are quite a few benefits. The most obvious is graduating with Latin honors (cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude)-it makes a nice little blurb on your r‚sum‚. There are GPA requirements for each level (those recommended by the Arts & Sciences Committee are 3.5, 3.65 and 3.8 respectively), but GPA is not enough: you need to fulfill your department’s honors requirements (usually a thesis).
Graduating with honors, however, is not the only benefit. Writing a thesis will force you to learn about your topic and about yourself. Before I began, I knew hardly anything about Scottish intellectuals like David Hume or Adam Smith, had never heard of Friedrich Hayek’s idea of spontaneous order, and had never read Herder’s masterwork, the “Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind.” Now, I have.
More importantly, I learned how to deal with a lengthy project. A thesis is more than four or five lengthy essays strung together; everything has to fit together and support a central argument. Researching and writing such a paper takes daily effort and tremendous self-motivation. In order to get it done, I had to constantly find new ways of pushing myself.
The very best part, though, is the feeling of satisfaction at meeting all the challenges involved. I am proud of what I have accomplished (even if mine isn’t the best thesis ever written). I am also proud of the other students I know who have poured their hearts and souls into their theses. I am especially humbled by my fellow history thesis writers. Because I was writing in intellectual history, I had the luxury of relying on published sources. Many of my colleagues spent a tremendous amount of time traveling to archives and poring over documents. To them goes the real acclaim.
I realize that today is not the due date for most theses (deadlines vary greatly by department). But for me, it is Thesis Day, a day to celebrate my own achievements and to salute the achievements of others. If you have a friend, daughter or son who wrote a thesis, you might want to give her or him a pat on the back. We deserve it.