Tea, theory and a healthy dose of procrastination 

Despite making a beautiful plan, columnist Arendje is getting very little done on her thesis.

The highlight of your academic career, the chance to apply everything you’ve learnt over the past few years: the thesis. My blinking cursor stares at me from a blank page, and this highlight is really starting to feel like a low point. It’s not that I haven’t learnt anything over the past few years – I do know things (I promise). I just don’t really know where to begin.

In week one, I made a beautiful plan, complete with lots of colours, plenty of time to relax and a generous buffer before the deadline. It lasted exactly three days, until I found out that my supervisor was impossible to reach. I eventually got in touch by asking another lecturer to send my supervisor a quick message, since I hadn’t had a reply to my email after a week: within ten minutes, I had an email back. Lovely.

When I finally got in touch with my supervisor, she said the research question I had come up with was much too broad, but that I could go ahead and start on my theoretical framework. On what? Apparently, I don’t even have a research question yet.

Next came my hunt for literature. Almost half the articles you come across are no use: they’re either behind a paywall or only the abstract is available online; time to put on my pirate outfit. Some of the other sources are in books that have been on loan from the library for six months, or the books are so dusty they give me asthma just looking at them. And when you finally find a reference that sounds interesting, it turns out it doesn’t even exist.

As if writing a thesis isn’t stressful enough, I’m also getting mixed messages from the people around me. A friend who has already graduated casually mentions that she just made things up as she went along and it all worked out. My parents ask me almost every weekend when I come home how many words I’ve written so far (as if my thesis were some kind of piggy bank that I put a euro into every week). My boyfriend brings me an unlimited supply of cups of tea, which I then forget to drink because I’m so absorbed in poring over an article that turns out to be completely irrelevant; such a waste of tea.

And me? I’m right in the middle of it. I feel that I have to write something brilliant, even though I know full well that in three years I’ll have forgotten what my research was about. Still, I can’t just put the stress of writing a thesis aside; after all, I need to get a pass to earn my degree.

My cursor keeps blinking steadily. The cup of tea beside me has gone cold by now.

I decide that it’s time to bake biscuits for the second time this week, and that I should probably give some more thought to whether that’s worth mentioning in the methodology.