Sometimes, students are confused about what a thesis is. Okay, it’s a long research project—but that description in itself isn’t helpful, because the term “research” gets used in a lot of different ways even in the course of a college education.
Research is everywhere in college but nowhere is it defined. Professors will talk about doing research, but students rarely get to see what that means. The textbooks will refer to research, but mostly in the context of presenting what others have done or said. Sometimes, course assignments will be called a “research paper”, but mostly that means looking up some facts in a specialized database (or on Google) and putting them together. Research seems to mean both a verb, referring to an offstage process, and a noun, referring to knowledge that other people know, and the most frequent way the noun and verb come together for students is when their “research” consists of looking up what other people know. The natural conclusion, then, and one students will come to without much prompting, is that research means looking up what experts think—and by definition that means students can’t be experts.
Breaking out of this paradigm in the context of a college course can be difficult. In Paul’s Congress course, for instance, students will follow a group of lawmakers in more or less real time as they issue press releases, introduce legislation, participate in hearings, and do other work related to being a member of Congress. Students write up those observations and relate them to the theories covered in class about why members communicate the way they do, why members introduce the bills they do, why committees act as they do, and so on. This assignment isn’t labeled research, though—even though it is in fact as close as a student can get to how research on Congress is done. After all, most of the articles and books on which the class was based ultimately rest on a careful observer sorting and analyzing observations taken to confirm or test some guess about how the world works.
Now we’re getting closer to what research really is. The level of research a thesis should aspire to is one closer to the level of faculty work: trying to understand something about the world that we don’t yet understand. In other words, research in this meaning is very much a verb, and it’s one where instead of looking up already known answers we are looking for answers that we don’t already know.
The other half of the equation, of course, is that it should be research into a question that we care about. There’s lots of things—literally, an infinite set of answers—that we could invest time in; the trick is setting your labor to crafting an answer to a question that’s meaningful (that is, that it will produce an answer someone else needs to know)—and doing so within the relatively strict time and resource parameters of an undergraduate thesis.
Yet the core remains the same. The point of knowing what others have said and written and experienced isn’t to summarize that and call the result a "thesis”; that’s a literature review, and that’s just one input into your thesis. The point is to ask a real question about a real topic and arrive at the best answer you can. Break out of the mindset that students can’t be experts and become an expert the same way the experts did: by working carefully and creatively to understand the world beyond what we already knew about it.
The takeaway: Research at this level isn’t about what’s already known—it’s about going beyond that.
The practical: Be strategic and sincere about how you plan your research. Strategic in the sense that your work needs to be feasible and you need to have identified the conversation you’ll be entering—sincere in the sense that you care about the answer that you’ll get from the question that you choose to ask.
You may also find these posts useful:
“Research is Harder Than You Think.” Embrace imperfection. Anxiety is a natural reaction to finding yourself in a place where all the next steps aren’t prescribed, but you can overcome it and make progress–and eventually some of the anxiety will go away.
“Embrace Little Ideas.” If you want to engage with big thoughts, you have to learn how to produce focused arguments.
“A Good Thesis is a Feasible Thesis.” 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.