To Thesis, or Not to Thesis

Juniors returned to campus from #sb2k16 to make a choice more fraught with repercussions than marriage or their vote in the 2016 election: whether to write a senior thesis. Facing the decision myself, I’ve spent the past few weeks flipping my thesis coin to the “yes” side and back as I learned more about the process. Every senior I’ve spoken to this year seemed to have a genuine passion for their topic…which tended to dissolve into frazzled disdain by March. As much as I love to write myself, I was too intimidated by stories of changing topics (more than once), Widener marathons and infinite revisions to readily proclaim my own scholastic intentions at the release of this year’s application.

With the proposal deadline for English concentrators fast approaching, it’s easy to get lodged between a thesis-less rock and an overcommitted place. My mind’s now mercifully made up, but others’ may not be. I turned to the time-honored tradition of Ye Olde Pro-Con Soliloquy to make the decision a little easier for the other juniors who contemplate the same choice.

To thesis, or not to thesis–that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The agony and edits of outrageous writing,

Or to hold college enjoyments high,

And through laziness avoid it. To party, to sleep–

No thesis–and by sleep to say we avoid

Widener, and the thousand hours writing

A thesis is heir to. ‘Tis a senior freedom

Devoutly to be wished. To party, to drink–

To drink, perchance to think–ay, there’s the rub;

For in Tequila shots regrets may come

When we have forgoed this lofty project   

To give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes a reward of a long thesis.

For who would face the red penn’d critiques,

Th’ Lamonster nights, dragg’d suitcase of books,

The sharp pangs of undercaffienation,

The dreaded deadlines, and the Gnomon

Price for a hard copy, if not to make

A work that defines thy final studies?  

Yet this merit arises from cruelty

Bound to one topic, to reading endless

And nights long, premature arthritis awaits.

Why select this scholastic torture,      

To cry and doze over thick dog-eared books,

But for dread of something after Harvard,

The unsecured job offer, a fret that

Joins all English students in mutual woe

And make us rather choose the tough thesis

Than succumb to inebriated seniority.

Thus Harvard doth make try-hards of us all,

And wipes tomorrow’s graduates of wants

Grown in merry drink and social spaces,

Minds clouded o’er with ambitious work.  

Passion, tis true, doth promote the thesis

To highest intellectual degree,

Proving thy worth. Thesis or no thesis,

One may find happiness in either side:

Through inner content are choices justified.

• shakespeare
• SOS
• thesis