Need advice on undergrad thesis

Parents Forum
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<p>Hello parents, I've been away from this forum for a long time but have come back because I can't think of a better group of people from whom to get advice and perspective on college.</p>

<p>This is going to be long-ish...</p>

<p>Background: Junior, double major in film production and Spanish, high overall and major GPA in both majors. I intend to do a thesis film for sure, but it will be a one-semester production class in the fall, not a year-long class. Additionally, I plan to do most of the production over the summer so that in the fall I will mainly be editing, rather than shooting. Meanwhile, I've been flip-flopping on whether I should do an honors thesis in Spanish as well. An honors thesis in Spanish would be a year-long class with the fall semester being mostly research and the spring semester being mostly writing.</p>

<p>I took a graduate class in Spanish cinema this semester and while I didn't hate it, I've come to realize that graduate school in the humanities is not for me. As far as I'm concerned for the moment, that's off the table.</p>

<p>I am on track for honors in my primary department, which is film production.</p>

<p>To complicate things, I've taken a couple of linguistics classes to fulfill distribution requirements and have come to really love the field. I'm thinking of adding linguistics as a minor (just two more classes) and am entertaining the possibility of pursuing some kind of graduate school in linguistics (could just be a one-year or two-year MA, could be more) but that is more than a few years out and a lot of things could happen in the meantime.</p>

<p>So the question: should I write an honors thesis in the Spanish department? If I were to write a thesis, it would most likely be something to do with language but not linguistics per se (language policy/the politics of language). It seems at the moment that my thesis advisor will be a linguist. While I'd love to do something that is out-and-out linguistics, I don't have the background for that yet.</p>

<p>As I see it, reasons to do an honors thesis include: writing sample, experience and reference for possible future graduate school (albeit in a different field), sense of accomplishment, good way to round off my time in the Spanish department. Pretty sure I won't regret having written it once I finish it, whereas I might eventually come to regret not having taken the opportunity to write one.</p>

<p>Reasons not to do it include: I've had a couple of semesters where I've done too much, and I want to ease off and smell the roses, especially as a senior because I know I'm going to be leaving NYC once I graduate. My academic interests have drifted and I'm worried about staying motivated to work on this for a full year.</p>

<p>Any suggestions? In the meantime, I'm going to get in touch with potential thesis advisors and start the process 1. so I'm not playing catch-up later and 2. so I can get a feel for whether I want to continue with this or not, but I want to hear your thoughts.</p>

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<p>My two cents as a professor who has supervised a lot of undergrad theses: only do a thesis if you really, really want to. That means that you like to write and that you have a topic you are invested in. Writing a thesis usually is MUCH more work than students realize.</p>

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<p>If you are thinking of graduate school in linguistics, you are going to have to be able to show some longish papers in linguistics (or something very close) and have recommendations from profs in linguistics. How does that figure into the plan?</p>

<p>(My d. moved from music composition as an undergraduate to musicology as a Ph.D. candidate, but luckily she had some background, and stuff to show, and she was a double major in Italian. It turned out that it was the Italian that made the real difference in her fellowship, and is pursuing a dual Ph.D.)</p>

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<p>Amesie, I hear you. Right now I’m not sure I want to. I can imagine finding a topic that I would love to work on, but I’m kind of burnt out on a lot of the sub-fields that I’ve taken classes on in the department so far, and it will take time to settle on something new that is also within my capabilities.</p>

<p>mini, that’s what’s giving me pause right now. The opportunity to work with professors who are linguists is tempting. I have two intro-level linguistics courses on my schedule for the fall (the other two classes I’ve taken so far have been electives) that will allow me to take at least one intermediate class in the spring, preferably something with a substantial research and writing component. I feel fairly sure I could get a great recommendation from my current linguistics professor, but a recommendation from a thesis advisor who is also a linguist, even if my thesis is not strictly about linguistics, would certainly not hurt.</p>

<p>Graduate school in linguistics at the moment is a thought, not a certainty. I definitely want to spend a few years working first, and in three to five years the idea of giving up an income and a developing professional life for graduate school in a completely different field may seem daft. At the same time, it seems rash to rule it out now and regret it later; there are some documentaries I hope to work on in the future where an academic background in linguistics will be very useful.</p>

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<p>Remember that most graduate linguistics programs are likely Ph.D. programs, and extremely competitive to get in (for the good ones); they usually provide full funding, but there’s probably 50 candidates or so per place. So you should ask yourself: what is going to make you really stand out? (It might be worth going to your career counseling advisor and figuring it out together.) </p>

<p>How are your language skills? Most linguistics programs are going to require at least two languages, I think (one likely to be German), and perhaps three.</p>

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<p>I agree that a thesis is not a casual undertaking. I wrote one to graduate with honors in Sociology and it was the main thing I did for an entire year. It was about 100 pages or longer and had many pages of sources. I can’t imagine doing it and filming a major documentary at the same time. </p>

<p>I think you need to take a good luck at all the things you want to do over the next 12+ months and estimate the time commitments for each and prioritizing.</p>

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<p>

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<p>This is simply not true, if you mean that they will require languages to get admitted.</p>

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<p>"Language Requirement - The department’s language requirement has two components:</p>

<p>(1) Reading knowledge of two languages of scholarship other than English. Native speakers of qualifying languages may count their native language for this purpose. Non-native speakers may satisfy the requirement by completing a second-year language course at the university level, or by passing a one-hour departmental reading exam (dictionary permitted).</p>

<p>(2) Knowledge of the structure of a non-Indo-European language. This requirement may be met by taking a “structure” course (e.g., Linguistics 171, Structure of Chinese), a course in linguistic typology, or a second semester of Linguistics 117r (Linguistic Field Methods). Practical reading and/or speaking knowledge cannot be used to satisfy this requirement."</p>

<p>This is Harvard’s. Berkeley’s and Boston U.'s are essentially the same. I don’t have time to go thru them one by one. You don’t need them to be admitted. At Princeton, you have to take one of the exams in your first term. (My d., not in linguistics, needed three languages, and, strangely enough, has actually had to use them.)</p>

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<p>^^agree - and for students/parents reading:</p>

<p>My kids in non-science PhD programs were advised to start the languages they would need for the PhD as undergraduates. It is very difficult to have the time in your graduate school schedule to learn the languages. Also, some graduate classwork will require reading scholarly articles in those languages, so someone without reading knowledge will be at a serious disadvantage from the very beginning.</p>

<p>My kids’ programs were more like 150-200 applicants per spot. Obviously the competition is fierce and the better prepared have an advantage. This is probably one reason so many students are getting MAs one place and then applying for PhDs. It is very difficult to be accepted straight from undergraduate studies, usually only possible for those students who arrived at their undergraduate university knowing what they intended to study and with a considerable background already.</p>

<p>of course, all programs are different - I don’t claim to be an expert.</p>

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<p>Many or most Ph.D. programs in both the humanities and sciences have the ‘reading ability in another language’ requirement. It’s not specific to linguistics. And there are ways to get around that particular requirement. </p>

<p>The ‘structure of a non-Indo-European language’ requirement as you have shown, is certainly not universal, and is essentially a linguistics course–learning about the structure of the language. As it says, being able to read or speak the language doesn’t fulfill that requirement. So if you are a native Arabic speaker, that does not fulfill this particular requirement.</p>

<p>There is this idea that in order to be a linguist, you have to be a polyglot. This is simply not true as well. While many linguists are able to speak more than one language, many do not. For linguists, language is the object of study here–we want to find out how they are put together, how they are similar, how they are different, how they are acquired, etc. We can do this without being able to speak the language, working either with a native speaker or with published ‘data’ (examples of sentences or forms from other languages that have been published). Or we work with our own native language. </p>

<p>I say this as someone who has a Ph. D. in linguistics, who is a card-carrying member of the LSA, and who has publications that investigate the properties of languages such as Lakhota, Spanish, Slave, Iraqi Arabic and Inuktitut, but I am unable to form a single sentence in any of those languages. I know a fair bit about the certain structures and constructions in those languages, but I am only able to speak English.</p>

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<p>My d. says that roughly half the students in her Ph.D. program failed the first language exam the first time around. They are given six more months to pass, and if they don’t, they won’t be admitted to candidacy. The second language exam is required at the time of qualification exams(toward the end of second year). If you don’t pass, the best you can hope for is probation.</p>

<p>UChicago requires the two reading languages, and more than that for the non-Indo-European language - the equivalent of at least one year of course work.</p>

<p><a href=“http://linguistics.uchicago.edu/graduate-program/language-requirements[/url]”>http://linguistics.uchicago.edu/graduate-program/language-requirements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>My language background is solid - 10 years Mandarin Chinese, four years German, college Spanish major. I’m not worried about that. Again, graduate school in a field that I’m still dipping toes into - I don’t want to operate on the assumption that it will happen, I just want to leave the possibility open. It will likely be a taught Master’s program, rather than a PhD program. My primary field is still film. I suppose a question to be answered is, if my thesis is only tangentially related to a possible future graduate program, is it still worth the additional workload?</p>

<p>Today is an I-don’t-feel-like-doing-a-thesis day. HImom, I agree it isn’t a casual undertaking, which is why I’ve been agonizing over it. The documentary will be in production over the summer and in post-production by the fall, which gives me a little more flexibility in terms of time management, but it’s still a lot of work. I don’t plan to be working on the film in the spring, during the bulk of the thesis writing. I’ll take your suggestion a step further and see if I can draw up a realistic week-by-week schedule for juggling all these commitments and still staying sane. </p>

<p>I don’t have to make a decision that’s set in stone until the first week of September.</p>

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<p>I forgot that this is college confidential, where you just keep hammering and hammering and hammering home the point you wish to make. These language exams were either not common amongst my colleagues or they weren’t simply an obstacle to gaining the degree. It was the least of their worries. </p>

<p>But heck, what do I know that the interwebs can’t tell you. I’ve been in the field for over 20 years.</p>

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<p>peculiarities: Do you already have a research paper to use as a writing sample for graduate school admission? If so, I don’t see the point of a thesis if you aren’t really excited about it.</p>

<p>skrlvr: In your experience, with students accepted into fully funded PhD programs in linguistics the last few years, what has been their language background?</p>

<p>My kids report the same grad school language exam issues as mini’s D. My kids are not in linguistics, though. They did need their reading knowledge from day one to do the course work assigned in their classes.</p>

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<p>I would suggest that if you are certain you do not want to do graduate work in Spanish AND you don’t have something you would like to pursue at the thesis level just for its own sake, that you take more linguistics courses instead to further explore that interest. My S–who also majored in a Romance language–flirted briefly with the idea of graduate work in linguistics when he was at about your stage, but after taking more courses decided it wasn’t for him.</p>

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<p>Consolation, I found your advice very reassuring for some reason. That feels like the right “default” option to me - that if by the first week of class in September I’m still not closer to a decision, that is the one that makes the most sense.</p>

<p>While agonizing over this at length with a friend, I realized that I can actually be quite passionate about the politics of language. It’s something that I know will form part of my documentary work in the future, so yes, it is something I would like to pursue for its own sake - just about the only thing left in the department that I would like to pursue, even. I think this is the first time I’ve ever articulated that in any shape or form. </p>

<p>I don’t know, I have to admit that there is some emotion and irrationality involved; I feel like the logical thing to do would be to not do the thesis (if I’m already going have a thesis and departmental honors in one major, do I really need another one in a major I’m not planning to pursue further?) but I am secretly quite a sentimental person and I feel like I would be missing out on part of the “experience”, even though I know that objectively the “experience” might turn out to be full of stress and hair-tearing.</p>

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<p>After more flip-flopping than an unscrupulous politician, I’ve settled on this: do the thesis and forget the Linguistics minor. It feels better to me to finish something I started (the Spanish major) than start on something new (the Linguistics minor), and I think the politics of language can sustain my interest for a year, if not more. </p>

<p>If I end up applying to a graduate Linguistics program (which, again, is more likely to be a one-year taught MA than a five-year fully-funded PhD, which is not on my radar), then let my application live or die on the quality of a language-related thesis in a language department, than on whether I took four undergrad linguistics classes or two. </p>

<p>I feel much better having made this decision, which I think is a good sign.</p>

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<p>Could you do that thesis film in Spanish and somehow have it count for both majors?</p>

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<p>Mathmom: nope. I already have a good idea of what my thesis film will be and there’s no way to make it in Spanish, but in any case, there’s no double-counting honors theses except in joint majors (and even then that’s really just one major, except in two departments).</p>

<p>I’ve decided after all to leave the door open for the linguistics minor, but I will certainly be doing the honors thesis.</p>