i’m writing my master’s thesis this year, and it’s agony. my days consist of just staring at a word document for hours on end without writing a single word. i used to read like 3-4 books a week, and i had this really ambitious project planned for my thesis. and now? lmao. i don’t think i’ve had a coherent thought in 9 -10 months
anyways…
:this-is-fine:
Life trick, get to reading the references for your thesis. Forget about writing for a moment. As you go throuh them select relevant quotations and citations and just copy paste them in your thesis document. This way you will have text to work with without having to bother with coming stuff on your own, and you don’t need to do that yet. Of course remember to use proper attribution and citation. Once you have a few of those, move them around a bit, so they are in the order you want and a narrative will start emerging. From thereon it will get much better.
The thing is, our brains work best wit coming up with things when they warmup and have a seed for that thing.
Very good advice. When I was doing my MA, I almost never knew what a paper was about until I was about halfway through it. I’d pull out quotes that related to something I thought was interesting, moved them around in a way that seemed to make sense, started adding my own thoughts/interpretations to the stuff I’d pull out, and then eventually go, “Oh, that’s what this is about.” And then, since I finally understood the point I was trying to make, I’d do another round of editing to make the point clearer and take out anything that ended up not being relevant. (But save that stuff that ends up not being relevant–it could come in handy for something else someday.)
This absolutely worked for me with mine, to get the initial movement going. I think my paper, as a written document, was nearly incomprehensible. The publication I turned it into was even more so, but I got a peer reviewed pub out of it.
My master’s defense was 2.5 hours long. When I walked out, my brain was mush after essentially spending an hour doing some kind of verbal judo sidestepping questions i didn’t know the answer to by making them into questions i could answer.
It wasn’t until they all conferred without me and then came out to tell me I passed, my research was interesting, and i was entertaining that i realized the process is just often pointlessly demoralizing and the format is basically there to see if you can do research and generate the two most common outputs (a scientific paper + a talk with discussion) on a topic of your choosing with limited guidance for an audience of pedants. i.e. can you be a self-starting communicator in a profession full of petty snobs and jackals?
Honestly the burnout is real. Im still in undergrad but holy shit has this semester been awful. I just finished my first break in 16 weeks and still had work due during it. I havent had time to just exist in months and its killing me. I wish you luck, comrade.
update: i’ve added some christmas lights to my room for enrichment purposes
Working from home is just a big blur of anxious avoidance at this point.
