Preface
Overview

Exploring a Topic and Finding a Supervisor

• Exploring a topic
• finding a supervisor
• setting objectives
• applying for funding

Calendar of Deadlines

• Class of 09

Focused Prep Work

• Refining your topic
• Focused Research
• Contextual chapter
• Openness to change
• Outlining
• Organizing research results
• Designing research methodology
• Initial writing

Drafting Chapters

• Making a schedule
• Writing mechanics
• Working with your supervisor

Revising and Editing

• Intro, conclusion and bibliography
• Revising
• Editing
• Printing, assembling & submitting

Late Policy

The process of writing a senior thesis is frequently referred to as a capstone experience in undergraduate education, one that brings together and completes the many forms of skill and knowledge you acquire. This is particularly the case in Social Studies. In several respects the curriculum is designed to prepare you for this process: it emphasizes writing from a very early stage, and also encourages independent analysis and scholarly argumentation of the sort that will be required of your thesis. Second, the Social Studies curriculum is not highly structured by particular requirements, but allows students to generate their own unified area of study, and it is frequently only in writing the thesis that it becomes clear that the diverse paths you have followed at least circle a common locale. Thus most students find the thesis-writing process an empowering experience: it becomes clear to them just how much they have learned in a few short years because they are now doing what had recently seemed impossible—writing an essay roughly one hundred pages in length. Not only immediately after writing the thesis but also many years hence, students and former students frequently describe writing a senior thesis as the most important and fulfilling academic experience of their undergraduate career.

Writing a senior thesis also requires sustained hard work and contains its hazards and difficulties. It is not uncommon for thesis writers to go through several “crises.” It is in the nature of the project that it may evolve quite radically, and the experience of having to reconceive a project you thought was progressing can be quite disconcerting. It is also often difficult to keep the project in perspective, to see it as a process that moves through several stages, none of which can be accomplished all at once but each of which can be carried through gradually. This is particularly the case at the beginning of the thesis, when the idea of producing a hundred-page essay can seem daunting. This handbook is written to address some of these concerns, to help students see thesis writing as a many-staged process, and to suggest strategies for dealing with particular difficulties as they arise. Implicitly, it also aims to reveal the many rewards that accompany the difficulties that naturally arise along the way. When you are done with your thesis, you will have mastered a scholarly literature, attained expertise on a subject that may rival or surpass that of many trained scholars, and produced a sustained piece of scholarly argumentation and analysis on a subject you find interesting and significant. Thus thesis writing has sources of immense gratification that usually far outweigh the hazards you will navigate on your way.

*****************************

I would like to acknowledge several debts accrued in writing this Handbook . The original inspiration for undertaking the project came from the excellent Government Department Senior Honors Handbook , and I have borrowed rather liberally in places from its many excellent suggestions. (I have not, however, reproduced much that is contained here, and seniors seeking further information—particularly those writing in areas of political science—may want to consult the Government Handbook as an additional resource.) I would like to thank Sue Borges for pursuing my offhand suggestion that Social Studies might want its own Handbook , and Judy Vichniac for applying for the funding that made the project possible. Maia Low patiently waited for last minute installments of the sections of this handbook e-mailed from afar and edited the final draft, removing the many errors of the hurried drafts. Finally, a different kind of debt is owed to the Social Studies community as a whole, from the members of which whatever wisdom contained in this Handbook was gleaned over the last several years. It has been my great good fortune during my stay in this haven for academic refugees to have many excellent colleagues and students and it is a genuine pleasure to get to write down what I have learned from them over the last half-decade.

David Peritz

Deep Springs, CA

--Back to Top--

I. Overview

Writing a senior thesis is like no other scholarly project you will have attempted. The length of the finished product and the sustained effort required to bring it to completion alone set it apart. There are other distinctive aspects: you will be working cooperatively with a supervisor in a one-on-one setting, and your supervisor will play no part in grading your work (other then determining your pass/fail grade for the senior tutorial); your work will be graded by at least two readers and you have no way to anticipate who they will be; and you will have the opportunity to discuss their evaluation of your work with them in an oral examination. Thus, while your junior tutorials and other courses will have prepared you in general for undertaking this kind of project, the many distinctive features of the senior thesis require specific preparation and approaches.

This handbook was written to help you in approaching this project, to allow you to prepare and budget your time appropriately, and, in general, to give you a more concrete feel for a task that, if viewed as a whole, can seem daunting but when divided into stages becomes not only tractable but also potentially a source of enormous satisfaction. Though no two theses develop in exactly the same way, several general stages and steps can be imposed on the process of writing a thesis. Many projects evolve through four rough stages: initial research, focused preparatory work, writing, and revision. These stages and the several steps internal to each will be explored in the subsequent sections of this Handbook . The main objective is to provide an overview of different steps involved in conducting a long scholarly research project and to offer some advice as to how to approach them.

One of the main problems students encounter concerns time management. Most Harvard students take on diverse activities and juggle their many responsibilities. Writing even long research papers is frequently done in intensive bursts, frequently during reading period. This approach simply will not work for a satisfactory thesis, and it is important to see this in advance as you may need to develop new work habits relatively late in your academic career. It is extremely important to develop schedules for completing different aspects of the project and to hold yourself to target dates . This is so for at least three reasons. First, you have a deceptively long time in which to research and write, few intermediary deadlines, and many different stages through which your work must evolve, so it is necessary to have an overview of your project as a whole and to distribute your time appropriately between the different stages. Second, it is in the nature of long research projects that there is always more work that can be done at any particular stage, so it is often necessary to force yourself to move to the next stage before you are fully satisfied with the results of the current stage. Third, one of the most important stages in writing a thesis is substantive revision of the arguments of the first drafts of your chapters in response to your supervisor's suggestions. Thesis revision usually takes between two and three weeks and as it comes at the end of the process as a whole, it will be crowded out if you fail to budget your time appropriately.

To assist you in envisioning the thesis as a sustained project that will move through several phases, this Handbook breaks down the thesis project into multiple phases and suggests at several different points that you generate a specific calendar that suggest goals for completing the different phases. The following overview calendar is offered to assist you in coming up with your own more specific calendar, and to give you an overview of both the process of research and writing a thesis and the contents of this Handbook . Long research projects tend to follow their own logic, and it impossible to anticipate in advance the discoveries you will make as you undertake detailed research, or the twists and turns your argument will follow on the way to its conclusions. The delicate balancing act that you must perform this year is to have some flexibility and openness to change as your project evolves, yet to hold yourself to at least the general goals you have set for completing specific stages. It is also the case that no two projects are alike, and this is especially true in Social Studies where projects tend to run the gambit of the social sciences and the humanities.

Thus the dates proposed—with the exception of hard deadlines—are rough goals and should be regarded as such. You may want to reject certain phases as all-together irrelevant to your project and revise other dates given the particularity of your research. It is also the case that the goals indicated in this calendar represent typical student experiences, and that typical theses come together fairly late in the allotted time. Many of the best theses are begun somewhat earlier with much of the exploratory and some of the focused research done over the summer. Thus you should, by all means, feel free to accelerate the dates in this calendar. Finally, here as elsewhere, this Handbook is no substitute for your good judgment and the advice of your supervisor. It offers only a useful general overview of some main stages and approaches.

--Back to Top--

II. Exploring Topics and Choosing a Supervisor

The topic of a thesis is the general area it explores, for instance the political economy of development policy, or the political theory of liberal tolerance. A topic is much broader than the particular subject that you will ultimately treat in your thesis, but many students begin with some general area of interest and spend the first phase of their thesis research exploring this topic to eventually arrive at a refined subject. (For students with a specific subject already in mind, you might skim or skip this part.) It is worthwhile to spend a fair amount of time exploring topics, to find an area that will sustain your interest over the course of a year, that is of genuine academic merit, and where you will be able to make an original contribution. Students sometimes rush this phase to get to more directed work quickly, and often come to regret that they spent too little time finding a topic that both interests them and is realistic to explore in a year and roughly one hundred pages.

Many thesis topics emerge out of courses taken in a student's first three years at Harvard, often out of Social Studies junior tutorials. Hopefully, while taking these courses you have begun to develop some specific topics of academic interest and perhaps already have written papers that explore areas you might be interested in writing on at greater length. If you are having difficulty finding topics to explore, it is often useful to review readings and papers from previous courses to see what caught your interest at the time.

There are several other important resources in exploring a thesis topic. Once you have at least a vague idea of what you would like to write on, you should speak with as many faculty and graduate students as you can to see what suggestions they might have for refining your topic. It is worth emphasizing that, although the senior tutorial is one-on-one, there are many people besides your supervisor who will have ideas - anything from interesting but neglected subjects to specific bibliographic references - that may be tremendously helpful to you. Do not be shy about talking to as many people as you want. And, if you are also searching for a supervisor, speaking with a number of people early on is often an excellent way to find one.

Another good source for inspiration is contemporary scholarship. You should search databases, using key words to see what has been written recently, and maybe spend a day or two browsing periodical rooms to peruse recent journals. Here, as elsewhere in the thesis-writing process, Harvard's many fine research librarians are a knowledgeable resource for finding information at different levels of specificity. A final resource is the list of Social Studies theses from previous years, which will give you some idea of the ways in which others have approached their topics. All theses that receive a magna minus grade or better are archived in Pusey, so you can also look up the work of your predecessors to explore their ideas and bibliographies.

--Back to Top--

The thesis writer-supervisor relationship should be unlike any other student-teacher relationship you have at Harvard. The senior tutorial is one-on-one, year-long, ungraded, student-designed and directed, and cooperative. There are many factors to weigh in finding a Supervisor, but for most students the most important consideration is choosing a person with whom you will have a good working relationship. Of course, the idea of a good working relationship is idiosyncratic. Some will need a supervisor to set and enforce firm deadlines while others want less of a task-master but more by way of reassurance in time of crisis. To determine what you need, you need to honestly assess your work habits: do you have a difficult time meeting unenforced deadlines, or are you self-directed but prone to panic in the heat of writing? One good indication is to look to what you consider your most successful academic work up to this point and determine what allowed you to produce work with which you are happy. Sometimes the person for whom you wrote your best paper will be available to supervise your work.

In addition to determining the kind of working relationship that best suits you and seeking a supervisor with whom you think you can work well, another perennial concern is your supervisor's degree of expertise in your topic. Sometimes these two considerations will compete, and it is necessary to decide which is more important. How much expertise you require of your supervisor depends on how comfortable you are with the topic you are exploring. Your supervisor can be a tremendous resource, and, especially if you work with someone who shares your research interest and your approach, the senior tutorial can be something of an intellectual apprenticeship. But in most cases there will not be an exact intersection in interests, and it is often the case that by the end of the thesis you will be more of an expert on your thesis subject than your supervisor!

Another issue to consider is the accessibility of different supervisors and the amount of demands you want to place on the supervisor. Some very independent students are satisfied with having a few meetings with their supervisors prior to writing and having a single draft of each chapter commented upon. Others want a closer working relationship, either at the brainstorming and research phases, or in terms of editorial assistance with writing. Though the distinction between more and less aloof supervisors does not correlate onto that between faculty and graduate students, it is often the case that teaching fellows will be more accessible and, perhaps, more sympathetic to the difficulties of undertaking a first sustained research project.

Once you have weighed these various considerations, you have to actually find your supervisor. At this phase, as in most others in the thesis-writing process, the best strategy is to talk to as many people as possible. Members of the Social Studies teaching staff are a natural starting point, as they are acquainted with the details of what is required of a Social Studies thesis and may be able to point you towards students who have done similar work in recent years. But you should also explore people beyond Social Studies, as the person with the greatest expertise or with whom you work best may be elsewhere in Harvard or beyond. The Social Studies Director of Studies or the Assistant Director of Studies are aware of potential supervisors and circulate a list of students seeking supervisors. If you are having difficulty finding a supervisor it is appropriate to make an appointment with the Director of Studies or the Assistant Director of Studies.

Once you have found someone with whom you want to work, it is important to be explicit at the outset about your expectations and to ask your supervisor to do the same. You can approach the initial agreement as you would negotiate an implicit contract, so that each of you is clear as to what you expect of the other.

--Back to Top--

Once you have decided on a topic and found a supervisor, you are well on your way to narrowing your interest to the point where you have a thesis subject - a series of related questions and propositions that the development, refinement and revision of which will form the bulk of your thesis. Much of the work of transforming a general topic into a specific subject is intrinsic to the topic itself and involves further reading, research, brainstorming and discussion with your supervisor. But there is also a different, more personal dimension to determining the scope and aims of your project.

Writing a senior thesis is a major undertaking no matter how you define your subject. However, there is considerable variation within thesis projects as to the degree of ambition of the argument, the scope of research, and, in general, the amount of time and energy invested. As you refine your project you need to assess your objectives in writing a thesis, your competing aims and commitments for your senior year, and then shape your project to conform to the realistic limits of your ambitions and time. You should think critically about your investment in the project as, unlike some other course work, there is much more at stake than a grade, and it is more difficult to anticipate the standards according to which your work will be evaluated. It is often helpful to ask yourself what you think you might value five years from now looking back on your senior year in general and your thesis in particular. It is also useful to read some past Social Studies theses, if you haven't already, to get a more concrete understanding of what exactly is involved. It is helpful to read a few very good theses by consulting Hoopes Prize essays that are kept in Hilles and Lamont, as well as retrieving some typical theses from the Harvard Archives.

Consider seriously your other commitments for this year. What courses do you have to take? Which would you like to take? Will you research and interview for jobs? Apply to professional or graduate school? Compete for fellowships? Many of these deadlines fall during crunch periods for thesis writing so it is important to anticipate them both in your work schedule and in setting the parameters of your project. Many students find it extremely helpful at this point to try to map-out their main commitments and activities for the senior year at least through spring break. Creating a calendar that lists when papers, tests, applications, etc., occur will allow you to determine when you should be turning to different aspects of the thesis project. In researching and writing a long work it is usually necessary to create periods for sustained work in which you can immerse yourself in your subject. Try to schedule both regular work on the thesis and particular periods for intensive research and writing.

--Back to Top--

Due to the fact that most deadlines for applying for grant money to support thesis research fall in March and April of the spring of the junior year, it is necessary to submit applications for funding relatively early on in the thesis-writing project. Thus students seeking funding are forced to accelerate the above steps to have a detailed description of their project and, in many cases, a thesis supervisor on hand to meet these deadlines. While this should not prevent the project from evolving as you conduct your research, it is important to bear in the mind that seeking financial support for research projects does require that the thesis project come into focus earlier and, in particular, that issues of research methodology have been worked out satisfactorily. Grants usually support research that can only be done in a specific locale and hence either requires that you remain in Cambridge over the summer or that you travel elsewhere. Most successful applications are for projects like archival research, data analysis or conducting interviews or surveys, though sometimes less research-intensive projects also receive funding.

Social Studies students frequently apply for the following grants. For a complete list of international grants, go to the Funding Sources database on the Office of International Programs Website.

The Susan C. Eaton Research Fund in Organizing, Leadership and Social Change in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies was established in memory of Susan C. Eaton, A.B. 1979, M.P.A. 1993, by friends and classmates. Eaton graduated magna cum laude in Social Studies with the first (and only!) group senior thesis entitled "Direct Action Organizing in the 1970s." She spent twelve years as an organizer, negotiator and supervisor of field services for the Service Employees International Union. A former Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, Eaton earned her Ph.D. from MIT and taught work organization, human resources management, and health care policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from 2000 until her death in 2003.

The fund was established with initial gifts from "the gang of five," the women who wrote the collective social studies thesis with her in 1979 (Adair Dammann, Sarah Royce, Karen Scharff and Stephanie Van Dyke). The purpose of this current-use fund will be to provide senior thesis research grants to students in Social Studies undertaking thesis projects related to organizing for social change. Preference will be given to projects in the areas of labor organizing, women's organizations, or women as leaders of social change -- fields that directly relate to Susan Eaton's interests. Preference will also be given to students whose research will include their own direct involvement in organizing. Students supported by the fund will be called Susan C. Eaton Organizing Scholars.

James D. Woods Memorial Fellowship in Social Studies was established in memory of James D. ‘Trey' Woods, A.B. 1985 by friends and classmates with an initial gift from Hope M. Harrison, A. B. 1985. The purpose of the fund is to provide senior thesis research grants to students in Social Studies. Preference will be given to thesis projects in the areas of communications, popular culture, and issues of gender and sexuality, the fields in which Trey Woods made his contributions. Recipients should also demonstrate a zest for life and personal engagement in contemporary issues. Student supported by the fund will be called James D. Woods Research Fellows.

Applications for the Eaton and Woods Fellowships will be available on the Social Studies website in mid-April, 2008. They are due in the Social Studies office by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 2, 2008.. Decisions will be announced in mid-May.

The Harvard College Research Program (Byerly Hall, 8 Garden Street , Tel.: 495-2585, mhhomer@fas.harvard.edu) supports student-initiated scholarly research and creative endeavors undertaken with faculty guidance. All undergraduates may apply, regardless of financial need. Funding can reimburse research and related travel expenses and/or provide a wage for students not receiving course credit for their work.

http://www.seo.harvard.edu/resprog/hcrp.html

Applications are due Wednesday, February 6, 2008 for the spring, and in early April for the summer.

Dean's Summer Research Awards (Student Employment Office, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden Street , Tel: 495-2585) are designed to give rising seniors who receive financial aid the opportunity to devote the summer to thesis research. The awards provide students who have already received a research grants with an additional grant to cover the summer savings requirement of their financial aid package.

http://www.seo.harvard.edu/resprog/deansummer.html

Applications are due Wednesday, February 6, 2008 for the spring, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 for the summer.

Several of The Following Grants Use the Common Application, due at the Office of Career Services on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 12:00 p.m
 

The Center for European Studies ( 27 Kirkland Street , Tel.: 495-4303) offers Summer Travel Grants for undergraduates writing theses on political, historical, economic, and intellectual trends in contemporary Europe .

http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/grants/ugrad.html

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies ( 1430 Massachusetts Ave. , Tel.: 495-4055 or 495-4750) awards a number of travel grants annually to Morocco and Israel .

http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu/ (Website should be updated by mid-December)

Committee on African Studies ( 1033 Massachusetts Avenue , Tel.: 495-5265) offers grants to assist juniors with senior thesis study of sub-Saharan Africa in the social sciences or humanities. Please note that it is required that you meet with Dr. Rita Breen before submitting an application (Ph: 495-5265, rbreen@fas.harvard.edu).

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cafrica/grants.shtml

The Davis Center for Russian Research ( 625 Massachusetts Avenue , Tel.: 495-4037) awards grants for undergraduate summer research in Soviet or Russian Studies. Preference will be given to students doing senior thesis research.

http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/student_programs/undergrad_trav_grants.html

The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research Undergraduate Summer Travel Grant (Coolidge Hall, Room 308, 1737 Cambridge Street , Tel.: 495-4046) funds travel to Asia for juniors and seniors for a senior honors thesis. Applicants must have at least two years of Chinese-language study. Questions should be directed to Jorge I. Espada, Asia Center , Coolidge Hall 308, 496-3981 jespada@fas.harvard.edu.

The Committee on Human Rights Studies (496-4950) Grants are intended to support students carrying out research projects anywhere in the world, including the United States , during the summer.

http://www.humanrights.harvard.edu/

The Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies ( 1737 Cambridge Street , Tel.: 495-4339) sponsors two grants for summer research by undergraduates preparing honors theses on Japanese topics.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/rijs

The Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (61 Kirkland Street, Tel.: 495-3366) DRCLAS awards grants to Harvard undergraduates whose research requires travel to Latin America or the Caribbean and research sites within the United States.

http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs ( 1737 Cambridge Street , Tel.: 495-9899) provides grants to assist undergraduates with summer senior thesis research in the area of International Affairs. All grant recipients become Undergraduate Associates of the WCFIA in the year following the summer abroad and are expected to present their thesis research at a seminar in the spring following their return.

http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu

The Center for American Politics (CAPS) will award up to eight summer research fellowships in the amount of $2,500 each to Harvard College juniors who are writing a senior thesis on any aspect of contemporary American politics. Undergraduates in any concentration in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are welcome to apply. The purpose of the fellowship is to enable students to spend time in the summer and in the fall of their senior year on thesis research.

http://caps.gov.harvard.edu/undergradthesisgrants.shtml

Next application deadline is in March, date to be announced.

The Institute of Politics (79 John F. Kennedy Street, Tel.: 495-1360) offers a limited number of Summer Research awards each year to Harvard undergraduates for summer research and fieldwork contributing to senior theses. The program is open to all students in all concentrations, but projects must pertain to American politics and public policy issues. Travel is restricted to the United States .

http://www.iop.harvard.edu/students_summer_thesis_funding.html

Applications are typically due in early March.

Carol Pforzheimer Student Fellowships (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Yard, Tel.: 495-8647) support a wide range of undergraduate research proposals based in the special resources of the Schlesinger Library and the Radcliffe College Archives. The competition is open to male and female students.

http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles/grants/pforzheimer.php

Applications are typically due in April.

The Charles Warren Center awards summer research fellowships to juniors in any concentration to enable them to spend two months of the summer researching a senior thesis on any aspect of American history. Please find application requirements and details at the Charles Warren Center website:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cwc/grantsundergradapp.html

Applications are due by 5 p.m. on Monday, March 10, 2008 ; deliver materials in hardcopy to the Warren Center , Emerson Hall Fourth Floor

--Back to Top--

Senior Thesis Calendar

Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

Class of 2009

Fall, 2007: Start Thinking About Thesis Topic

• Try out a topic in junior tutorial research paper
• Talk to tutors and other faculty members
• Attend Social Studies Junior Thesis Workshop
• Read sample theses

Spring, 2008: Choose a Topic, Find a Supervisor, Obtain Funding

• Attend Junior Thesis Workshop, if you have not done so already
• Keep thesis journal of potential topics, methods, and supervisors
• Write second junior tutorial research paper
• Create a 1-2 paragraph description of potential thesis topics, “shop around” to potential supervisors
• Attend Junior Methods Workshops
• Apply for funding
• Apply for human subjects approval if you are doing primary research over summer
• Declare topic and supervisor to Social Studies

Summer, 2008: Conduct Research

• Conduct primary or secondary research, depending on topic
• Apply for human subjects approval if you have not done so already
• Begin to analyze research results

Fall, 2008: Complete Research, Analyze Results, Begin Writing

• Attend Senior Scare Meeting, September 17 th , 2008
• Write thesis prospectus, due October 10 th , 2008
• Conduct primary research as needed;
• Analyze results
• First chapter due to supervisor January 5 th , 2009 (try to complete it earlier!)

Winter, 2009: Finish Writing

• Draft remaining chapters
• Present findings at Senior Thesis Presentation Workshops
• Complete first draft of thesis by March 1 st
• Thesis due March 19 th , 2009
• Take fabulous spring break!
  

The student who has an area of interest but not yet a specific or focused subject for a well-unified thesis needs to undertake further research, brainstorming and consultation with the supervisor and others to gradually refine the topic. One way to test if your topic is sufficiently focused is to see if you can ask a single, precise question that your thesis will answer. You need then to ask yourself a further series of questions: can this question be answered by you in less than a year and around one hundred pages? Will it sustain your interest over this period? Are the question and your proposed answer of scholarly interest to those who work in the field of study? Finding a subject question is in part a matter of balancing breadth and focus, of conceiving of an area that is not so broad as to prevent you from conducting specific analysis or defending meaningful conclusions but not so narrow as to fail to raise issues of scholarly importance. Eventually you will be able to list a series of related questions and propositions that answer your line of inquiry and satisfy these desiderata; then you have a thesis subject. However, at this stage many students have difficulty formulating that single precise question: their topics are either too general, or too specific or simply not sharply focused enough to support sustained scholarly research. If you are in this position—as many are early in their senior year—there are a variety of strategies you can use to further refine and develop your topic.

One useful approach is simply to read more, and as you are doing so, to focus your reading in an increasingly narrow area. As you discover books and articles on topics of interest it is useful to scan carefully footnotes for further references that may lead you to a work that sparks your specific interest: footnotes lead to more footnotes, etc., until you find a subject that allows you to formulate precisely the question you want to ask. Often what prompts the kind of question a good thesis answers is reading broadly on your topic until you find an aspect of the scholarly discussion that seems unsatisfactory: a claim that seems anomalous; a debilitating lacuna in an argument; a point that needs greater elaboration before it can be evaluated; an implication of an argument that no one seems to have explored; a conclusion that seems obviously flawed; a methodological shortcoming like the neglect of a group or kind of data that calls into question the validity of generalizations; a recent or historical case study that has not been considered. Often such a problem will strike you when you find it.

It is also extremely important that you continue to speak with others as your topic evolves. Obviously, it makes sense to continue to consult with your supervisor, as he or she may have specific suggestions for a subject or readings, and will also be able to draw on experience to tell you if the specific question you have hit upon will work as the focus of a senior thesis. You also should speak more broadly with whomever you are comfortable discussing your ideas. Students can be embarrassed to admit to each other that they are not exactly sure yet of their thesis subject, but if you overcome reticence here you will most likely discover that many of your peers are in more or less the same situation and bouncing ideas off of them and brainstorming with them can be very helpful. You should also consider consulting at this phase with other faculty members and graduate students besides your supervisor as they will often have helpful suggestions.

When you are able to state a precise question that your thesis will answer, you are ready to move from the exploratory to the focused research phase of the project. In focused research you are searching for material that will be directly of use to you in developing the arguments and supporting the conclusions that will be the substance of your thesis. The research that goes into your thesis will be far more extensive than that necessary for an average research paper, so it is necessary to devise particular strategies for conducting and organizing it. First, it is important to think through the different stages in the development of your research and to generate a schedule for when you will complete these stages. Here, as elsewhere in the thesis writing process, developing a schedule and holding yourself to target dates is extremely important. As already noted, there is always more work that can be done at any particular stage and it is usually necessary to force yourself to move to the next stage before you are fully satisfied with the results of the current stage. At this point in your research, it is important to differentiate general research that contributes to your growing grasp and mastery of your subject, from specific research that supports a particular aspect of your argument. You will be conducting both kinds of research simultaneously, as the material you study will not neatly divide into these two categories, but it is helpful to discriminate these two kinds of research both to think through your schedule and to help you to organize your notes.

Typically the transition from exploratory to focused research occurs in the fall of the senior year, ideally in the first quarter of the semester. Focused research seeks to address a precisely formulated question. Once you have your thesis question in mind, you need to start developing your answer. The goal of general but focused research is to develop a solid grasp of the scholarly writings on the subject of your thesis and to refine the content of the argument you want to develop. To develop your specific argument, to make sure that your proposed answer to your question is in fact sufficiently original, and to determine which debates you will need or want to intervene in, you require a general overview of the main approaches and most important arguments in the field that is the focus of your study. Usually, the phase of general focused research coincides with and goes into the writing of your thesis prospectus, which is due in Social Studies in early- to mid- October.

Often more focused research will follow the same path you took in conducting your exploratory research: chasing footnote after footnote; perusing recent periodicals; speaking with your supervisor and other experts in your field who may call to your attention particular pertinent citations. When your research reaches this level of focus, you are also able to take greatest advantage of computerized databases, and it makes sense to take advantage, either for the first time or again, of the expertise of Harvard's research librarians.

General but focused research is necessary for you to acquire the background that will inform your argument throughout your thesis. It often comes to the fore in the ‘theory' or ‘literature review' chapter of your thesis, so it is worthwhile to briefly describe this chapter at this point. While there are no uniform substantive standards by which all Social Studies theses are evaluated—hence the scare quotes around theory and literature review—it is widely expected by both students and readers that theses will contain a chapter that is not specifically devoted to developing the particular argument of the thesis. Instead, it situates the argument with regards to more general debates in the field of study and explores issues of research method with the aim of justifying the specific approach taken in the thesis. Sometimes, however, a student might choose to address the relevant theoretical sections within the body of the thesis. The introductory chapter would then take a somewhat different form.

Given the fact that Social Studies students have been introduced to the classic works of social theory in their sophomore year and had more specific seminars in their junior year to introduce them to specific fields of contemporary research, it is reasonable to expect that theses will manifest a fair degree of methodological self-awareness: an awareness, that is, of the variety of ways of approaching a specific topic, and the resources and limitations of different approaches. In justifying the approach you take in your thesis, it is appropriate to demonstrate an awareness of these issues as they relate to your field and your specific argument, and to justify explicitly the particular approach you take. In so doing, it is not necessary to claim that this is the only fruitful approach; it is often more persuasive to show an awareness that there are other productive approaches. In doing your general but focused research, you should be thinking through the choice involved in adopting a specific approach to the study of your topic, and to begin to outline the organization of your ‘contextual' chapter.

It is in the process of conducting focused research that the details of the specific arguments that will be the meat of your thesis will develop. It is important, as you read, analyze, interview, etc., that you continuously examine the implications of the new information you are surveying for the arguments of your thesis. To develop your arguments it is important to search for evidence that supports your general position and to consider how its details might inform the nuance of your arguments or lead to subtle modifications of your basic claims. It is also important, however, to remain open to the possibility that you have misformulated a basic issue, or that your initial thoughts on a subject are in need of revision. An attitude of openness and experimentation at this phase, while you are still accruing your expertise, can save you the difficulty of later discovering that you have painted yourself into an untenable corner. As Rilke observed in the fourth of his Letters to a Young Thesis-Writer : “be patient towards all that is unsolved in your thesis and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

As you conduct general but focused research you also need to start thinking through the organization of your argument, specifically how it will break down into chapters. This organization will almost certainly evolve, and it is important to be open to reorganizing your argument as you come to better understand its internal logic and the relations between its components. But at this phase in the research process, you need to start breaking down your argument into its sub-arguments and to think through the appropriate relations between these components. Many students find it useful at this phase to look again at works they admire—books, articles or other students' theses—to examine their organization, and to generalize a ‘model' argument from these works to determine if their argument can also be organized in this way. Ultimately it is necessary to break your argument into chapters and (usually) your chapters into sections, and thus to develop a working outline of your thesis. Having an (probably evolving) outline on hand can be enormously helpful in a couple of respects: it allows you to better plan when you will finish researching the specific aspects of your argument; and it enables you to organize the results of your research and will allow you to assess it as you move from research to writing.

An important element of conducting research is devising an approach to organizing your results. You will probably read hundreds of books and articles over at least a six-month period, and it is almost certainly the case that you will not simply be able to remember the specific location of arguments or points you want to refer to when you want to refer them. Instead, you will need to employ some systematic form of organizing your work, and the sooner you hit on an approach, the less redundant research you will need to do later, searching for that point you know you saw somewhere. Different students use different strategies for organizing their results, and it is important to find a strategy that works well for you, given your approach to research, the dimensions of your project, and the idiosyncrasies of your memory and writing process. Typical approaches include using computerized databases (if your doing archival research, be sure that you can bring computers into the libraries you need to use before adopting this approach), note cards organized in file-card boxes, file folders, binders, or journals with detailed indexes. In general, err on the side of excessive organization: when you are in the throes of writing in February, you will thank yourself for having jotted down specific notes to yourself about where to find or how to use a particular argument.

If you are seeking grant support, and if you are planning on conducting archival or field research or doing data analysis over the summer before your senior year, it is necessary to devise your methodology in the late spring of your junior year. Not much can be said in general about methodological issues, given the specificity and diversity of Social Studies research projects. It is too often the case that a Social Studies thesis is scuttled because of poor research design. It is essential to consult extensively with your supervisor concerning research method and design, and, if she or he is not able to assist you fully, to seek out others. Ideally, you should discuss your methodology with someone who has conducted research of the type and in the field you propose to study.  Students contemplating qualitative methodologies for their senior theses are strongly encouraged to take Social Studies 30, "Methods of Social Science Inquiry" in the spring of their junior year.


APPLYING TO THE HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE
If you are planning on doing survey or interview research, you will need to contact the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research (CUHS) to determine whether review will be required. Any living person from or about whom information is collected for a scholarly study is deemed a "human subject." University regulations and federal rules require review and approval, in advance, of most human subject research. The CUHS meets monthly during the academic year and applications for approval should be submitted two weeks prior to the Committee's meetings.
Application forms, meeting schedule, and reference material are available at:  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~research/HumSub.html ; < mailto:cuhs@fas.harvard.edu >cuhs@fas.harvard.edu
Contacts for the Committee include Emiko Saito, 496-2618; Jane Calhoun, 495-5459; Ken Carson, 495-9829; and Elisabeth Parrott, 496-6535.

One important decision to make at this phase in the thesis project is when to begin writing. You should at this point have a reasonably clear, if revisable, idea of how your project breaks down into chapters, and which of the focused research still to do supports which chapter. Thus it is possible to alternate researching and writing chapter by chapter, or to do much of the research in advance of writing and then write the chapters one after the other. This is not a strict dichotomy when working on a project of this length. It is usually necessary to interrupt writing to consult notes or do further research, or a piece you have just read may prompt a stream of writing at a point where you intended to continue to research. Neither an alternating nor a more segregated approach is necessarily superior to the other, although the first strategy does have the advantages of allowing you to write earlier and facilitating recollection of research material. One thing many students find useful is to begin writing early on in the focused research phase, not drafting full chapters but undertaking short thought or reaction pieces that may be useful as subsections or as extended and well-organized notes. Writing shorter, less formal pieces has the advantage of getting you in the habit of writing early, and can be very useful later on if your shorter pieces fit into the larger whole of your chapters.

You should also recognize, as you begin to write, that you are not setting out to write the thesis as a whole and that much of what you write will soon be revised, perhaps even discarded. It is especially helpful to keep this in mind if you find it difficult to begin writing because the project as a whole seems daunting, you do not know where to start, or you feel that there is still too much research to undertake. You will have to start writing sooner or later, and the writing process usually gets easier once you have begun. If you are having particular difficulty beginning—the dreaded thesis writer's block—you might try composing your first ideas not in the form of a chapter or even a thought piece, but as something less formal, like a letter to a friend or to your parents, or as a journal entry. Once you get started in this less formal vein, you will no doubt discover that you do in fact have much to say. If you are having particular difficulty getting started writing, both the Writing Center and the Bureau of Study Counsel offer specific help for thesis writers.

IV. Drafting Chapters

MAKING A DETAILED WRITING SCHEDULE

Most students begin writing in November or December to complete the first chapter by the deadline in early January. The rest of January and February should be spent on writing and beginning to revise the remaining thesis chapters. Given the fact that you will also have other papers to write and exams to take over the reading and exam periods, and that many job interviews occur in February and March, it is extremely important to schedule your time carefully during this crucial period. Much of what distinguishes a good from a mediocre thesis is the fact that the good thesis has undergone significant revision. An argument as long and complex as that contained in a thesis requires significant revision; and to have time to revise, it is necessary to finish writing at least several weeks before the thesis is due . Thus you need to be as realistic as possible in setting out a writing schedule and do your best, perhaps with the assistance of your supervisor, to hold yourself to the deadlines you set.

--Back to Top--

In an essay of this length, lack of clear structure and organization almost surely dooms your thesis to incomprehensibility, no matter how good your arguments are. It is important to approach your thesis as a single, unified argument composed of several essays that develop sub-arguments, explore counter claims, set the general context, and contribute to the whole. Therefore, organization needs to be considered at several levels: for the essay as a whole; within individual chapters; between chapters; and at the level of specific sections of chapters devoted to particular arguments or explorations. It is necessary to balance considerations of style with these issues of internal structure, and in particular, to explicitly and frequently orient the reader as to where they are in the argument and why it is that you are treating the subjects in the particular order you have adopted . The following suggestions help you to guide the reader through the complex and varied arguments of a thesis.

• Careful attention to structure before writing : You should work from an outline, and before writing you may want to consider several alternatives for structuring the thesis as a whole and each particular chapter, determining which allows you to position arguments most closely related to each other nearest to each other.

• A detailed thesis statement and map of the arguments you will make must be clearly set-out in the introduction . With a paper of this length, it will be necessary to spend several pages introducing your argument. Your thesis statement will probably be complex, so do not think it needs to be contained in a single sentence. The introduction should briefly discuss the main arguments that will be used in support of the thesis in the order in which they will appear, and give some account of the interrelation between them. It should also preview the specific chapters to follow, and the way they develop the logic of your thesis.

• Treat each chapter at once as a distinct essay and as a component of the thesis . Each chapter should have its own introduction that, like the introduction to the thesis as a whole, sets out its thesis or main claim and contains a road-map to its central argument, but also explains its relation to the overall argument of the thesis and particularly to the previous chapter.

• Within each chapter employ frequent intermediary transitions : It is important to remind the reader at various points where exactly you are in the argument, how far they have come, what has been proved, what remains to be demonstrated, and what ultimately is at stake. A long chapter will almost certainly contain several relatively independent arguments, and often also features nested arguments—sub-arguments that support an argument that supports one part of your thesis. The relation between these various layers of argumentation will often be crystal clear to you, but opaque to your reader. Pause not only at the conclusion of an argument but also within it, particularly in the transitions between paragraphs, to remind the reader how the particular point at issue relates to the larger context in which it is contained.

• Clear and explicit definition of central terms, explicitly adhered to throughout the work : When using a term that is central to your argument or that recurs throughout your thesis, make sure you have a clear definition of it, based on the texts you are working with or your own analysis. Explain the reasons for using this definition. And try to relate the particular term to other aspects of your argument. In general, try to translate jargon into ordinary language, and be careful not to let terms do the work of arguments. In a thesis in which chapters often stand to each other as fairly independent essays, it is particularly important to make sure that you are using terms consistently or, if your meaning has shifted for a good reason, that that reason has been explicitly given and the implications of the shifting meaning for the consistency of your argument taken into account.

• Consideration of counter-examples and arguments : In a work of this length, it is not sufficient to merely develop your own argument. When criticizing alternative approaches, but generally when making an important point, attempt to adopt the perspective of a person who would object to your point and to answer their criticism, either implicitly or explicitly. If you have conducted your research broadly and been open to different perspectives and arguments, consideration of objections should not be terribly difficult.

• Write for a sufficiently general audience . In writing other papers, it is usually the case that you can assume a certain commonality with your reader. Often the topic under discussion is a text that has been read and discussed in common with your instructor, and you have developed your essay topic in consultation with her or him. Dangerously, the tendency to assume familiarity with your topic tends to be exacerbated in a thesis. It very well may be that your readers have only a glancing familiarity with the specific area of scholarship you have chosen. The tendency to assume familiarity is exacerbated because in your research you have thoroughly immersed yourself in your subject, often reading authors who write only for a narrow professional audience. Unlike those you read, it is your responsibility not only to develop specialized arguments but to explain the assumptions, logic and relevance of these arguments to those not steeped in the specific field. The tasks of revising and editing will be much easier if you remind yourself throughout that your audience will probably be much less familiar with your subject than you.

• Pay attention to issues of style . Another pitfall of thesis writing is that students can get caught-up in the details of a particular argument and neglect issues of style. The best theses not only treat difficult and interesting arguments but also employ polished prose, interesting metaphor, imaginative imagery, and a captivating style. These are issues that must be addressed when you begin to revise and edit, but your job here will be more manageable if you take this into account in writing the first drafts of your chapters.

--Back to Top--

There are a variety of ways to use your supervisor during the writing process: to help you set and meet deadlines; to discuss in advance of writing specific approaches to chapters or arguments and thus to avoid what may be obvious mistakes, digressions, or distractions; and, most importantly, to read and criticize, and to suggest constructive revision of your chapter drafts. To fully take advantage of this unique pedagogical relationship, it is necessary to consult with your supervisor with some frequency and to coordinate your work calendars with each other so that you will be able to get your corrected drafts back in a timely fashion that allows for revision. Your supervisor will also be busy with work of his or her own, and may also have other thesis students. At this point you may need to negotiate further the details of your working relationship, or to remind your supervisor of previous commitments. How frequently should you be meeting? When do you want your drafts back? Is your supervisor reading only one or several drafts of each chapter? It is also important that you are able to take into account fully your supervisor's criticisms or constructive suggestions. It may make sense, if you are not receiving written comments, to take notes as your supervisor discusses your work, for it may not be until you are actually undertaking the revision that you fully understand what he or she was driving at. You may also want to consult with your supervisor as you are undertaking revisions, to determine if a line of response adequately addresses the difficulty that has been raised. To do all this, it is important to have regular meetings and open lines of communication, as well as adhere to the schedule you mutually agreed on.

Many students find that it works best to save writing the introduction and conclusion until after they have completed their thesis, or else to substantially revise them once it is clear how the argument will turn out. It is important in scheduling your writing to leave time to fashion a good introduction and conclusion, for in a work of this length they do important work. The introduction should interest the reader in the project as a whole, indicating either generally or through an illustrative anecdote the significance of the subject of study and the conclusions reached. And, as already indicated in the section on writing mechanics, the introduction also plays an important substantive role in setting out the most important claims of the thesis and explaining the logic of its organization. Similarly the conclusion plays an extremely important role synthesizing the main claims of the thesis in a way that allows the reader to evaluate their cogency and their broader implications. It is also important to bear in mind that with a work of this length, merely assembling the bibliography can be a time consuming process, take a couple of days, or longer if your citations are incomplete and require checking.

--Back to Top--

Revision is one of the most important stages in the process of thesis writing . It is also one that too many students neglect as they tend to have little experience with revision and because it comes towards the end of the process and thus tends to get crowded-out by researching and writing. Revision is not the same as editing for mistakes, organization or style, which tends to be the extent of re-writing that occurs in shorter research papers. Revision, as it applies to thesis writing, is the process of changing, sometimes more, sometimes less radically the content of your arguments in order to respond to the criticisms or constructive suggestions of your supervisor and anyone else who has read an initial draft of your thesis. The ability to solicit criticism of your work from a reader trained in your discipline prior to having your work graded is one of the unique opportunities of thesis writing, and if used appropriately , it can dramatically improve the quality of your work. To take advantage of this opportunity, it is imperative that you finish drafts of your chapters sufficiently far in advance . Usually it takes between several days and a week to fully revise a chapter. Budget your time according.

Often, in responding to your supervisor's suggestions, it will be necessary to pick and choose between different lines of revision. Here as elsewhere you need to be realistic about what you can accomplish in the time that remains. Often it is possible to introduce a major change in the line of the argument in one or two chapters, or to read and incorporate a limited amount of new research. After you undertake a revision it is also important to check for internal consistency to be sure, for instance, that you have not changed an argument in one chapter that is relied upon in another, or omitted a passage that is later referred to in passing.

One of the reasons that revision is time consuming is that it is usually necessary to take some time to reflect and determine if you think that your supervisor's criticism is well founded. Is it the case that a flaw or a gap in your argument has been discovered and exposed? Often it is. Or is it, instead, that you have poorly expressed your argument in a way that gives rise to the objection? By clarifying your claim can the objection be dispelled? Further, it is often necessary to ponder a line of revision to come to understand it fully before you incorporate it into your thesis, or the revised section may be worse than the original. Unless you have left more than a few days to a week for revising a chapter, it is not advisable to try to incorporate entire new works or lines of argument.

It has already been indicated that good theses do not only present illuminating and original arguments but they do so in lucid language and polished prose. Attention to the quality of your prose style cannot be reserved to the end of your project. Along with attention to the fact that you address an audience that may not share your degree of specialized expertise on your subject, you must take into account issues of style as you are first drafting and then revising your chapters. Nevertheless, a final edit of your thesis in the week before you submit can do worlds of good. First, because of your thesis's length and its status as an evolving document, it almost certainly contains numerous typographical errors, incomplete citations, inconsistencies introduced in the process of revision and the like. While glitches like these do not necessarily reflect the amount of work that has gone into the thesis, they distract even a good-willed reader from the substance of your arguments, and often suggest to a less patient reader that the argument is as shoddy as the prose that conveys it, and thus lead your thesis to get less attention than it may deserve on its merits. For these reasons alone, you need to leave time for a careful editing job.

But a good final edit can do more than catch obvious sloppiness: it can also alert you to places where jargon distracts from substance, sentences of tired, dreary or passive prose that are easily replaced by lively, imaginative language; an argument that is quite important to your conclusion that is at risk of being lost among others because the language that carries it is not emphatic enough; a complex claim that could be made vivid to the reader's imagination by finding the appropriate metaphor. After you have devoted the better part of a year to examining and writing about a specific area of interest, you owe it to yourself to find language adequate to your understanding of and enthusiasm for your topic. At this point, many students find it useful to show their thesis to friends in other concentrations or to their parents. Just the exercise of thinking through how someone with almost no familiarity with the details of your argument might react to the way you have framed your claims may suggest important lines of stylistic improvement. But to beat that familiar drum yet again, you will not be able to lend your argument the degree of polish it deserves unless you save sufficient time to undertake a final editing and to incorporate the stylistic advice of your informal editors. Ideally you should begin your final edit ten days before the thesis is due, allowing yourself a week for editing and three days for assembling the thesis.

PRINTING, ASSEMBLING AND SUBMITTING THE THESIS

Printing . Printer problems often accompany printing a paper the length of your thesis; printers that have never before misbehaved can simply refuse to print 120 pages. Make sure that you leave plenty of time for printing, and that you have sufficient paper and ink or toner cartridges on hand.

Copying . Copying may also seem straightforward, but remember that length equals time here as well as with printing, and that there tend to be long lines at Harvard Square copy shops when theses are due.

You also need to be sure that your thesis conforms to the following Social Studies and University regulations :

Length . Essays should range from 20,000-30,000 words in length (approximately 80-120 pages, printed double-spaced in 12 point font). Please be aware that the essay should not fall much below 20,000 words nor exceed 30,000 words of text. (Notes and appendices do not count towards the word limit). Essays that exceed 30,000 words may be penalized by the reader up to ½ grade.

Format and Presentation . Two copies of your essay are to be submitted to the Social Studies office, each enclosed in a black spring binder. You may borrow these binders from Social Studies. Use thesis-quality paper (available at the COOP or Bob Slate), because essays which receive evaluations averaging magna minus or higher are sent to the University Archives.

Acknowledgments . When the thesis is submitted, please leave out an acknowledgments page. If your thesis is accepted for submission to archives, you will have ample opportunity to insert acknowledgments.

Printing should be on one side of the sheet only and essays should be double-spaced except for quotations of more than 50 words and foot-notes. Pages should be numbered.

Margins should be eight spaces (one inch) at the top and bottom of each page, with two inches at the left edge and one inch at the right. These margins should be used throughout the essay, including endnotes and any appendices.

Footnotes . Follow the foot-noting or end-noting conventions of the discipline with which the essay is most closely associated. If notes are given at the bottom of the page, a continuous line should be drawn from margin to margin between the text and the footnotes (or as long a line as possible).

Title Page . Here is an example of the text which should be appropriately centered and spaced on the title page:

(Title of essay (should be located towards the middle of the page))

An Essay Presented

by

(first name, middle name, and last name of author)

to

The Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for a degree with honors

of Bachelor of Arts

Harvard College

(month and year)

Social Studies does not like to impose penalties, and we hope that the policy spelled out here will not have to be applied to any senior.  Nevertheless, for the record, this sheet describes the Social Studies policy on late senior honors essays.  This policy is in line with the penalty policies of social science concentrations.

The deadline for your essay is 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 19th, 2009.  Essays submitted after that time will be penalized severely.  The grades for a thesis are: summa, magna, cum, or non-honors.  An essay that is borderline between two grades will fall to the lower grade if the essay is submitted on Friday, March 20th.  An essay turned in on Monday, March 23rd will invariably be penalized a full grade.  Penalties accumulate such that an essay submitted on or after Friday, March 27th (a week or more late) will fail to receive honors.

Penalties will be waived exclusively in cases of medical illness or grave family emergency; students should consult with Anya Bernstein, the Director of Studies, in that event.  Crashed computers and slow laser printers are not considered valid causes for extensions.  You should plan to have the first draft of your essay finished by late-February to allow three weeks for revisions, typing, proofreading, and printing.