| The Master’s Thesis: Overcoming Its Challenges |
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Martha L. Finch, Missouri State University
The Master’s Thesis: Practical and Psychological ChallengesIn the department of religious studies at Missouri State University, Master of Arts students have the option of either producing a research portfolio, which includes seminar papers and other written work, or writing a thesis. We counsel those who intend to apply to PhD programs to write a thesis, and currently around twenty of our thirty or so MA students are writing or planning to write theses. In the process of completing a thesis, students develop many of the skills necessary to become professional academics: the student formulates and produces a substantial project that demonstrates the ability to engage and apply the appropriate scholarly literature, to perform original research and analysis, and to articulate findings through writing and revising (often several times). Completing this rigorous process demonstrates both to the student and to potential doctoral programs that the student is able to craft an original project and engage in the sustained research and writing required to materialize that project. Perhaps more difficult than the actual work itself is the psychological test of maintaining one’s focus and effort over the course of the project. The combination of practical and psychological challenges often means that students find it difficult to complete the thesis in a timely manner. On the practical side, our Master’s degree is a two-year program, during which students must complete thirty credit hours. For students writing a thesis, a core of eighteen of those credit hours must be in seminars distributed across four fields (biblical studies, South Asian religions, the history of Judaism and Christianity, and religion in America); six of the remaining credit hours may be dedicated to the thesis. However, virtually all our students complete their coursework in two years and then take at least another year, and typically more, to take exams and especially to write the thesis. In spite of our MA handbook’s recommended length of 80–100 pages, these theses often grow into projects of 150–200+ pages, a length unwieldy for both students and advisors. With the Missouri Coordinating Board of Higher Education expressing concern about statewide degree completion rates, my department recently has implemented strategies intended to streamline our program’s schedule, provide more hands-on advising, and ultimately help students more efficiently complete their theses and degrees. Three initiatives appear rather obvious, in retrospect: 1) Agreeing that we should be more proactive in guiding our advisees to craft thesis projects within the recommended page range (80–100 pages); 2) Reconfiguring "comprehensive exams" as "qualifying exams" and moving them from the end of the student’s tenure in the program (when he or she is also attempting to finish the thesis) to the beginning of the second year; and 3) Requiring a thesis prospectus that includes working titles and abstracts for the overall thesis and its individual chapters, a literature review, and a schedule for completing chapter drafts. A fourth, and perhaps less obvious, strategy has been initiating a biweekly (every other week) writing workshop. This article focuses on the writing workshop, which has been the most recent addition and for me, as its facilitator, the most challenging but ultimately rewarding and successful. While it is too soon to say definitively, feedback from students indicates that they are finding all of the changes noted above very beneficial, both practically and psychologically. For example, requiring students to include in the prospectus a schedule for completing chapter drafts illuminates the realities of accomplishing a major project in a timely manner, provides a structure for accomplishing it, and elicits a sense of commitment to that structure. This has proven to be helpful, yet students still often end up not meeting that schedule. Thus, this past academic year I initiated the writing workshop, with the goal of creating a supportive intellectual environment in which participants committed to and met writing deadlines. At the beginning of each semester the group developed a biweekly schedule: each member agreed to produce a thesis prospectus or chapter draft by a particular date, and another member volunteered to serve as respondent. The author distributed his or her prospectus or chapter draft to the group a few days before the scheduled workshop, everyone read it, and the respondent prepared a written response. The author opened the meeting with a few introductory remarks to set up the context for the chapter or prospectus and highlight where he or she felt it needed participants’ ideas and input, the respondent read the response, and then everyone discussed the piece. The workshop was successful beyond my expectations, although there were also some challenges. Having made commitments to the group, all participants met their writing deadlines and received crucial feedback from the other members; other minds thinking about one’s work allowed for new perspectives and insights at a point when often the author was so immersed in the project that it was hard to "see the forest for the trees." Sometimes the feedback was as simple (but profound) as suggesting that a chapter open with a vignette drawn from an informant introduced in the previous chapter to provide a transition between the two chapters. Other times the recommendations were as complex as challenging the methods and theories an author was using to interpret the materials. I was surprised and impressed by the thoughtfulness and insights that emerged from the students’ careful attention to one another’s work and their sense of professionalism. At the end of the spring semester I asked each of them to write a paragraph or two describing their experiences in the workshop: what worked well, what did not, and how it might be more effective. Students unanimously found the workshop to be "incredibly helpful" and "invaluable." Noting especially the psychological angst evoked by the "daunting task" of producing a thesis and the "desperate isolation" and "painful and lonely process" of writing, they found that being part of the group, "seeing the successes and struggles of others," created a "sense of solidarity" with those encountering the same psychic challenges. The group "established writing as a collective process rather than an isolated pursuit, [and] it fostered both empathy and critical evaluation." In practical terms, the feedback participants gave and received provided "guidance and direction" and "offered solutions that ultimately led to the conclusion that my efforts had not been wasted, but rather simply needed refinement." For one student, “the most important aspect of the reading group is having an ability to talk about your work and flesh out your ideas more thoroughly.” Another emphasized the aspect of professional development: "These collaborative exercises contribute to honing students’ writing as well as equally important techniques of evaluation, critique, and commentary." And for another, "the greatest benefit of participating in the thesis workshop has been that it has instilled a sense that I am becoming an authority on my subject. My colleagues come to our sessions armed with thoughtful questions that force me to clarify my thinking and my arguments. I usually leave our meetings with a greater sense of what I am trying to do with my research than when I arrive." The primary practical goal of the workshop was met: participants completed work that otherwise they would not have accomplished in such a timely manner and it was better work. Psychologically speaking, engaging with a cohort of colleagues, all struggling with the same sense of isolation that the research and writing process tends to engender, provided a supportive environment that helped to mitigate the unsettling periods of lack of perspective on and confidence in one’s work, the "vacillation between inspiration and crisis," as one participant put it. There are some challenges to overcome, however. About fifteen students began as workshop participants in early fall; by early spring only five remained. Some dropped out because of outside work or family commitments, others because they felt they needed to use the time to work on their own theses rather than read others’ work. Another possible reason is related to an issue brought up by a student who did participate the entire year; she found the wide variety of thesis topics problematic: "If a topic was too outside of my area of interest I found it difficult to offer insights because of my lack of knowledge." Notably, by the spring semester the five students who remained in the workshop were all writing on topics in North American religion, and discussions were better focused and intellectually more fully developed and thus more constructive. That these were the five remaining students is perhaps not surprising, since they represent the majority of our students; most write theses on religion in America. The student who felt she could offer little insight on topics outside her field highlights a critical challenge to the workshop’s effectiveness: the difficulty of incorporating students from the four diverse fields within the department. One solution to this might be for faculty members from each of the department’s four areas to facilitate separate writing workshops for students in their fields, as in many doctoral programs. However, this is not a practical or viable alternative for our program (or likely for other stand-alone MA programs), since some fields have very few, perhaps only one or two, students writing theses. For the workshop to be successful for all students, we must develop ways to communicate across the various fields represented by participants. One way to do this would be to focus workshop discussions less on a chapter’s or prospectus’s topical content and more on how it is structured and the writing process itself. Some of the most valuable feedback students offered and received concerned advice about writing itself, such as transitions within chapters or from chapter to chapter. In preparation for workshop discussions, participants might approach each chapter or prospectus with a basic set of questions in mind, such as:
One advantage to including participants from different fields is that students can receive feedback about the accessibility of their writing. Rather than assuming that readers have a background in the author’s topic and will understand specialized terminology and theoretical models and their application, for example, authors learn which areas of the thesis are not easily grasped by nonspecialists and receive guidance on how to make them more accessible. Thinking about these issues ahead of time and then dealing with them in the group would focus attention on elements of structure and process that participants can apply to their own research and writing. In conclusion, as all who advise Master’s theses know, doing it well demands a great deal of time and energy of us, as well as of our students. Finding creative ways to reconfigure the process, making it more efficient practically and less stressful psychologically, is a current goal of my department. Each year, the university selects one thesis from among its forty-five Master’s programs to receive the University Distinguished Thesis Award; in the past eight years, three religious studies theses have won the award. Hopefully, the strategies we have introduced, including establishing the writing workshop, will contribute to the increased success of our students completing their theses within two or at most three years — theses that will continue to be among the best produced at Missouri State University. |
Martha L. Finch is an associate professor of North American religious history at Missouri State University. She received her PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (Columbia University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Finch is currently working on a history of plain dress in North American Protestantism. She also advises more Master’s theses than she can reasonably keep track of.