One common stumbling block for the thesis student concerns ambition—specifically, having too much ambition.
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with ambition. To paraphrase one hero of capitalist labor, ambition is good. Ambition works. If you’re unambitious, then why should you or anyone else care about what you’re writing? You should want your time on earth to mean something, and that means investing your time into work that others will profit by.
Yet it’s easy to go too far the other way. There’s a lot of frothy discourse that high school and college students imbibe in the United States that raises expectations dangerously, even stupidly high. Take some of the things that college admissions brochures or inspirational TikToks say too seriously, and you can regard any goal short of solving global warming or achieving world peace as underachieving.
Unrealistically high expectations can be just as much a deterrence to good work as undeservedly low ambitions. If the bar for terming something a success is set a mile high, that’s not going to encourage people to reach it — it’s just going to mean that every effort will be a failure.
The thesis version of this results from a combination of genuine ambition and inexperience.
It’s a tricky thing to calibrate expectations. Big ambitions are important: students should be fired up about researching and tackling a new project. A good thesis program or university will even (properly!) encourage this, because you’re going to need a fire in your belly so large when you start that there’s still enough embers to keep the project warm six or twelve months into the hard slog of actually doing it.
But inexperience means that students can underestimate just how much work it can take to even do the reading preparatory to the original part of research. (Hell, we’re both pretty experienced researchers and we underestimate this part routinely ourselves.) And, of course, making a big impact often requires access to tremendous resources—and, more than anything, time.
Encountering this interplay between ambition and resources, by the way, is as much part of why a thesis is a valuable experience as the formal introduction to research that everyone always touts. Learning how to manage time and expectations to produce the highest quality work possible is not just a professional skill but a life skill.
Thesis projects, then, need to find a way to make a big impact given limited resources. How should people do this? Find a feasible project that contributes to a big debate.
Feasible doesn’t mean unambitious. It just means that: feasible. Thinking (and asking for advice!) about what can be done can help direct writers away from blue-sky visions (“I’m going to overturn nuclear deterrence theory!”) and instead help them focus on direct engagements in a debate (“I’ll use archival records to show that nuclear deterrence was less of a contribution to President Ford’s thinking than people have assumed.”).
A thesis that makes and defends one specific intervention into a big debate is a success. That can take many forms, from carefully applying different theories to a specific case to see what really happened to collecting original data to check a specific application of a theory. That’s how science (or at least scholarly debate) advances: not by hot takes and bold declarations, but by the accumulation of evidence and argument that gradually wins adherents over time. Theories weren’t established in a day and they’re unlikely to be overturned in a thesis.
The takeaway: It’s okay to be focused! Focus is good and helps you find projects you can actually accomplish, rather than getting dejected that unrealistic plans aren’t being realized.
The practical: Identify a big debate, and then find pivotal cases, assumptions, or data you can use to make a specific, feasible contribution to that debate.