There’s a yawning gap between the popular portrayal of professorial life and the reality. The popular portrayal is one of mystery and mockery tinged with maybe a degree of envy. Whatever professors do, it’s deep but weird—and they sure make a lot of money doing it! It’s a perspective that dates back to at least Aristophanes’s mocking Socrates in The Clouds (okay, so sometimes we do make obscure references). But the reality is that professor-ing is a job, and, like any job, the parts that the public sees are often only a small and misunderstood portion of the actual labor.
Why bring all of this up? Because often students who are beginning their thesis projects—we mean at the beginning-beginning, like finding a topic and an adviser—approach the project like they’re playing the fantasy version of a professor’s job. They think that doing research means trying to think the biggest possible thoughts. We’ll exaggerate a little bit to preserve anonymity, but imagine a thesis proposal that’s basically “my new idea will overturn forty years of discussions about terrorism” or “let’s explain Congress or even “let’s show why universal peace is the only solution.”
“Hold up,” we hear you thinking. “Narrow? I thought you guys were in the ideas industry! Shouldn’t we want our topic to be as broad as possible?”
Absolutely not. Research as an enterprise rarely works by throwing big ideas around—it works through the incremental development and testing of parts of those big ideas. Think cold science, not hot takes.
If that sounds unusual to you, well, you’re not alone. “It must be nice to be paid to think big thoughts all the time!” some well-meaning soul once said to one of us. That misconception is natural, especially given how we professors are usually portrayed. In film and television, professors are always solving spectacular puzzles in long-lost archaeological quests, quoting dead poets to inspire wealthy students with dead souls (or poor students with lively souls), or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning because we’re so deeply distracted by our big, complicated thoughts.
In our experience, very little of this is true. (For one thing, since pandemic, neither of us has even visited a drycleaner’s; second, we wouldn’t be caught dead in the Temple of Doom.; third, we teach in public schools.) Research professors in particular often aren’t thinking big thoughts but small ones: What’s the right statistical technique for this analysis? What’s the right way to frame this contribution? Does this theory apply to different groups equally or could there be some variation based on what we know about other groups and theories?
Some outsiders (and probably even some of our colleagues!) would view this as a surrender of ideals. If professors aren’t thinking the big thoughts, then who is? We think this constitutes a category error. Big thoughts and grand debates take years or decades—even lifetimes—to play out to their conclusion. Sitting around and making vague gestures toward “Big Thoughts” hardly contributes anything useful at all. That’s not research—it’s just kibitzing.
The real labor of an intellectual consists in making arguments: learning how to assemble logic, evidence, and rhetoric to produce discrete claims that link to bigger debates. From time to time, to be sure, some flash of genius may illuminate a field and force us all to see things anew—but even if you’re a Darwin or a Lin Ostrom, you’re going to have to put in the effort to craft your argument in a way to shape how others receive your big ideas. (And if you don’t know how to publish and persuade in the vernacular of science, you may not be a prophet but a crank.)
You may not want to be a professor—we have a lot to say about that career path—but learning about how these arguments are made is important. On the other hand, if you do want to be an academic, we can guarantee that an application to graduate school that showcases a deep and focused engagement with the literature will do better than an essay talking about how great ideas are. The admissions committee will roll their eyes at that. Sure, ideas are great—now what are you going to publish?
Even if your ambition is to overturn everything we know about American politics or macroeconomics or international conflict, in other words, you’ll need to master the tools of the trade. And that means beginning with something that bridges your role as a student consuming others’ ideas and a researcher bringing your own to market. That’s the goal of the thesis, and that’s why you should embrace the little thoughts.
The takeaway: If you want to engage with big thoughts, you have to learn how to produce focused arguments.
The practical: The more you can relate big thoughts to specific contributions, the more seriously you’ll be taken—and the more you’ll deserve to be taken seriously.