The Big T

Master Thesis. For some reason, these two words seem to cause an unreasonable amount of distress for a big number of people, both beforehand, afterwards, and in between the actual writing.

I say unreasonable because that’s what it seems to me.

Yes, it’s going to be a huge amount of work. A lot of concrete, hands-on, going through tons and tons of articles, literature, essays, conference papers etc. -type of work. On top of that, it requires an even bigger amount of work that is mostly unmeasurable: analysing, theoretizing, thinking and pondering. Over and over again. Last, and most probably least, is the actual writing, which will also require patient rewriting after rewriting after rewriting, with a lot of copy-paste in between. Interesting seminars, conferences and random conversations will also take up time and energy. And that’s just a quick depiction of the thing.

Sounds like a lot, so let me give you some perspective: a master thesis is about 100 pages, including the title page, table of contents, sources, appendixes etc. On comparison, the essays we write in university courses can be anything between 1 to 20 or even 30 pages, and if the subject is interesting, filling up 30 pages is not an issue. Rather, it seems to be too little. Doesn’t sound that bad anymore, right?

Well, if it does, let me add some more perspective: the usual time given for writing a course essay is about one or two months, and this is while studying full-time, meaning attending lectures and so on. The usual time given for writing a master thesis is one year, with only one or two courses on the side. A whole frigging year for writing 100 pages! Even with all the work that has to be done before the actual writing, I can’t seem to grasp the horribleness of the thing, no matter how hard I try.

On the other hand, maybe I’m a just fool trying to convince myself that it can’t be that bad. On the third hand, I spent a lot of time during the past two years trying to find out what exactly is so intimidating and life-suckingly exhausting about writing a master thesis, and this is all I came up with: nothing.

Well, no matter what my attitude towards it may be, it has started; my two-year-long journey through master studies, climaxing (or anti-climaxing) in writing The Big T.

Here goes nothing.