200+ hours
66 participants
35 pages
20 references
12 flashcards
9 mnemonic pictures
3 letter sounds
1 thesis!
I can’t believe I actually just handed in my undergraduate thesis. It kind of felt like handing over a piece of me I wasn’t ready to part with!
In case you don’t know what a thesis is, it is basically a large research paper that you do as part of your course work if you are pursuing an Honours Specialization in a particular subject area. You would most likely only do a thesis is you had a strong interest in research or wanted to go to grad school.
In Psychology, an Honours Thesis is an independent research study. Unlike in some other disciplines, it involves collecting data or using already-collected data to draw conclusions about research questions. The women in my thesis class at Brescia are all studying really interesting things, like disparagement humor and interpersonal judgment (Anita Gullo), sex differences in emotional memory (Ashlyn Swift-Gallant), and the effect of food rewards on pain tolerance (Rosemary Kimani-Dupuis).
Doing a thesis is a HUGE undertaking. It involves:
- Thinking about an area of interest
- Conducting a literature review (this means reading about a MILLION papers)
- Creating a study proposal and ethics submission
- Getting our study approved
- Presenting a poster of our expected findings
- Finding participants and getting informed consent
- Testing participants
- Compiling data
- Running statistics
- Drawing conclusions
- Writing a final report (complete with references, graphs, appendices, tables…)
- Making a presentation (Our thesis conference is April 16th at 8:55am in room 136 if you would like to come! Everyone is welcome.)
At every stage, there is so much to do! It can be a frustrating, tiring, boring, angering, and discouraging process. But, I have to say (now that I’ve handed it in): completing your own study is SO rewarding and SO cool! Even though at the moment I’m mostly just exhausted and in shock, I know that I have done something I can be really proud of. I also know that there are many other students who have just come through the same thing- and I have so much respect for their hard work and dedication!
Congratulations to everyone who has just completed or is completing an Honours Thesis. Let’s go out and celebrate! (Okay, maybe we can wait ’til after exams.)