The thesis writing takes place over fall and spring semesters of your senior year. Some students begin background work in their junior year. Think about a topic that interests you and ask a faculty member to be your advisor.

If you aren’t sure where to begin, you can always start by looking at past WGS theses. You can find past theses online here.

This will give you a sense of what a completed thesis looks like. You will see how long they are (some are as short as 30 pages, others as long as 100 pages), what kinds of topics in your area of interest students have addressed before, or other topics in general that WGS scholars have written about. You will see what level of originality and sophistication we are looking for: not a professional article or a Ph.D dissertation, but a well-reasoned, careful analysis that tells us something about the world we didn’t know before.

You will need to enroll in the humanities pre-thesis tutorial in the fall (21.THT) and the Undergraduate Thesis in Humanities (21.THU) in the spring of your senior year.

THT and THU are worth 6 and 12 units respectively. For the Pre-thesis Tutorial, you can check in weekly with your advisor and follow a set of deadlines. Expect to do most of your research early in the thesis-writing process. Students can learn how to refine research skills using a variety of library databases and/or archives, depending on the topic. In THT, much of your focus will be on completing an initial review of literature pertinent to the thesis topic, and refining the research question. All thesis students must turn in an annotated bibliography and initial draft of 25 pages representing their work in progress to their advisor by the last day of reading period in the fall term.

For the Thesis Tutorial in the spring (21.THU) you will be working mostly with your advisor on finalizing drafts. At this stage your initial research will have been completed, so the focus of the semester will be primarily on writing and revision. The extent to which you will meet with your advisor will largely be determined by you and your advisor to keep the thesis moving along until the due date, at which time it will be submitted to your committee for evaluation.

Finding a research question that is interesting to you, interesting to others in the fields you are working in, has not been answered already, and can feasibly be addressed in six months of active research is not an easy task. Many students find that this is one of the hardest parts of the process.

The first step is to recognize that this is perhaps the single most important stage of the thesis process. If you find a topic that sincerely interests you, the rest of the process will be enjoyable and probably less difficult than you think.

It is natural to think that the time commitment to your thesis will grow gradually – you will work at a steady pace in the fall, step it up in December and January, and potentially ramp up in late spring before the thesis is due. Try to start writing as soon as you can, even if what you’re writing isn’t exactly right immediately. Early writing may take the form of annotations/notes on sources you plan to use, definition of terms, explanatory or summary paragraphs about the topic or debates in the field that impact your argument, or early drafts of your approach to answering the research question you have identified. Using ‘reading/research’ as a way to put off writing is one of the most common forms procrastination takes. You can experiment with approaches to an argument many times before you and your advisor arrive at the best framework and organizational structure for your paper. Think of writing down your ideas and experimenting with the structure and even the content of your argument as an exercise. Your final paper will be a lot less convoluted if you work out some of this before you set about writing your final draft.

Avoid the temptation to narrow your search too fast.

Ask yourself what broad subject areas interest you the most: sexuality studies? gender and the environment? social justice? gender in film and/or literature? the history of science? The search at this point should be more specific than a sub-field (“I’m interested in the environment”) but less specific than a real research question (“How have environmental regulations in North Dakota impacted the formation of family units among Native Americans?”).

Once you have one or two broad areas, read. Literature, newspapers, journals, documentaries—anything that seems relevant. You want to know what questions people who care about this subject think are important. You also want to know what kinds of evidence, arguments, and critical frameworks people have brought to bear on these questions before. What kind of information do reporters writing about this draw on, what theoretical frames have scholars used to approach the topic, what fields did they come from and how has this affected the questions they asked/didn’t ask?

After a couple of weeks of this, you’ll be an expert. Then you can start brainstorming specific research questions. Make a list of ideas. Talk about them with your advisor, peers, and professors. If you can explain your topic to someone who isn’t knowledgeable about the topic, that’s a good sign. If they think it’s interesting, that’s even better.

As soon as you can articulate a handful of broad subject areas that interest you, you should talk with faculty members. The goal should be to talk to as many as possible. Don’t worry at this point about who will be the advisor. Send emails (keep these short, save the details for talking in person) and make appointments. Faculty members are busy and often hard to pin down, so make an appointment to meet sooner rather than later. You don’t need to have taken their course. Faculty love talking about research and creative ideas, and talking with students is their job. You can browse potential advisors and their fields of expertise on our website.

When meeting with faculty, be prepared to talk about your areas of interest. If you’d like, write up a single page summarizing your interests to prepare and organize your thoughts. When finding an advisor, you don’t need to propose specific research questions. You want to find out what parts of this topic they find interesting, what work has been done, and what directions they think you should go in next.

It’s good to feel comfortable with your advisor. You can read over their CVs and a few of their recent papers before meeting with them to have a sense of their interests and why they might be a good fit for your thesis topics of interest. You can ask them questions about their own work – whether specific or just “what kinds of things are you working on these days?” Faculty members always enjoy talking about their research.

By the end of September, you should choose your advisor. If you need assistance finding a faculty advisor, contact WGS Faculty Director. You will need to have this faculty member sign the Thesis Registration Form by October 15th.

In the month leading up to your thesis deadline, your advisor will work with WGS to determine a two-person committee to read and grade the thesis. Your thesis grade will reflect the average of the two grades. Each reader will prepare extended remarks about the thesis, which you will receive, but you will not receive the individual grades granted. In the case that there is more than a full grade difference between the evaluations of your two readers, a third reader/grader will be determined and the final grade will reflect the average of all three. Your advisor may or may not serve as a reader/grader (some feel they are too close to the project by the end to objectively evaluate it, others feel they understand it uniquely). In each case, it will be up to the advisor to decide their role in this regard, and WGS will determine the committee in conversation with the advisor.

Remember that your thesis may not follow the path you expect. You may set out to answer one question, find that what interests you is a second one, abandon that for lack of sources, and then stumble into a third. This is what research and writing is about.

Most importantly, remember that we are all here to help you. This includes faculty, your thesis advisor, the WGS Director, and WGS administrators (x3-8844) or wgs@mit.edu. If you have any questions or concerns, just ask someone.