Personal Growth and Mental Health
My Senior Thesis Project
I’m going to graduate this Thursday after four years studying Interactive Multimedia and minoring in Graphic Design at The College of New Jersey, and it’s pretty surreal. I’ve had a really wonderful time at college for the most part, but it was not without its ups and downs. My last huge hurdle was my senior thesis project. One, because it’s a big, cumulative project that requires a lot of time and effort, and two, because I faced some of my own inner demons while working on it. Admittedly this post has been written partially because it is required of me as my final assignment here at TCNJ, but in truth I was planning on writing this anyway. I truly hope that sharing my own personal experience will benefit others who go through this program after me, and maybe even those who are outside of the world of TCNJ. When I was at my worst I spent a lot of time trying to find other people writing about similar difficulties, so this is my contribution.
From close to day one, and even before that at prospective student visits, I’ve known about IMM’s senior thesis project. It’s supposed to be a culmination of your years with the program, a project that you work on for an entire year (and for a lot of students, more than that). As a result of the broad range of talents in the IMM department and fast pace of our field, the projects are always diverse and changing as the tech trends do. Thesis was always looming in the back of my mind but never something I thought I should be worrying about in my undergrad years when I still had lots to learn.
During my second semester junior year I figured it was time to get a concrete idea in my mind so I could get a head start, and ensure my project would be THE BEST SENIOR THESIS PROJECT EVER. Without my conscious awareness, I had been building up the importance of thesis and raising my personal expectations for my own project for a while. I’d be featured on Fast Company and Wired and all my favorite design blogs. My project would be talked about at future theses for years to come. It seemed healthy to me at the time to strive for greatness in this way but in retrospect it can be really, really detrimental for your self esteem and productivity when this perfectionist idealism kicks in.
I toyed around with many, many different ideas for my project in my second semester of junior year and throughout the summer, but nothing really struck me as extraordinary and I still had time to keep searching. When fall semester of my senior year began, I still didn’t have anything concrete, but the first two weeks or so were dedicated to exploration so I still had time.
After about a month or so in to the new semester there was still no certainty in my head. I was starting to get nervous. Other students were figuring out their ideas. We were moving from ideation to planning and research. I was starting to have less time and my brain was still scolding me to come up with something groundbreaking while at the same time refusing to help me out with any of that idea making magic. The toxic mix of the pressure of time and the self-inflicted pressure of perfection would quickly lead to me to barrel straight into the grasp of my old friend anxiety.
Anxiety, I’ve been reminded at least half a dozen times of your evolutionary relevance and I’m not impressed. “It might not make sense to have crippling anxiety induced panic attacks in today’s world but imagine the usefulness when your ancestors were face to face with a bear!” My thesis was not a bear, I knew it was not trying to attack me, and the symptoms my body was producing in response to my thesis/bear were not helping me in the slightest. They were actually hindering my progress in overcoming my barriers, making thesis harder, making me lose time, and as a result making the anxiety worse. What an awful spiral.
I try to keep a personal journal to keep track of my life experiences and personal thoughts, both to vent and to look back at later. According to my journal the anxiety really began to set in on or around October 5th 2015. That post went like this.
Here we go again.
It seems my anxiety is triggered by one moment of stress that just sends the rest of me overboard, and then I just spiral. This time it was thesis. Why can’t I rise to the challenge? I don’t want to slink back and be afraid and paralyzed. And I tell myself, “it doesn’t matter” “just have fun with it” “it’s okay to fail”. But once the anxiety creeps in I can’t shake it until I “solve” the problem or feel comfortable again. I want to be able to live with uncertainty. But once I get anxious, I doubt my abilities to even concentrate on solving the problem.
Everyone’s personal experiences with anxiety are probably different, but mine tends to come in long term “episodes” caused by one or more uncertainties in my life. As long as the uncertainties continue to be present that anxiety will bleed into every aspect of my life basically making everything suck. Physical symptoms are nausea, shakiness, dry mouth, a weight in my chest, and a lack of appetite. Mental symptoms are a lack of concentration, rumination, and a general feeling that I just can’t think anymore. This symptom is so hard to describe but it’s the killer one. I just feel like my mental facilities are so preoccupied with being worried that there is no room to problem solve or remember things or even have a conversation. This particular “episode” that started in October would go on until around the beginning on January.
So it’s the beginning of October, my brain is fighting me over this massive project ahead of me, and I’m trying to carry on my life and academic career like nothing is the matter. It would be impossible not to. I have responsibilities and other classes and I don’t want anyone to know about my inner turmoil. For a few more weeks it is easy to ignore thesis and focus on other work. Due to time constraints I decide to hone in on the topic of food waste reduction, since I’d already put a lot of time into researching this. But as it turns out food waste is a massive, complex problem and probably not the best topic for a perfectionist undergrad with limited time who is currently going through a long-term anxiety episode. So now I’m trying to come up with the best possible solution I can create that will be super impressive, be within my range of skills, and be produced well enough that it can help snag me a job after college. My ideation and idea jumping continued for the remainder of the semester.
When the deadline for Winter Showcase (the midway show where we present our works in progress) was approaching, I was still on the idea phase, had none of the deliverables we were supposed to have for class, and was literally changing my idea weekly. I started thinking catastrophically. I didn’t want to be in Fast Company anymore, I was focused on staying in school. I was honestly afraid I wouldn’t be able to return to school for the spring semester if I stayed in the condition I was in. I made contingency plans in my head and started toying with the idea of quitting my leadership roles and cutting ties with extracurriculars I really cared about. My social life suffered and I felt like I couldn’t even be around my friends anymore without making things worse due to my anxiety induced awkwardness.
When the day of Winter Showcase arrived I presented the idea I happened to be on that week. I in no way wanted to be presenting at an event that I had looked forward to at the beginning of the year. I struggled through the two hour trade show presentations hoping no one important would decide to show interest in my “project”. The idea I landed on was ambiguous and in my mind unworthy compared to the extraordinary project I had imagined I would be presenting in this moment months earlier. After that night I was only concerned with getting to winter break, so I could be away from school and responsibilities and just focus on somehow fixing my derailment.
Miraculously winter break did slowly help me get better. With the immediate pressure lifted, non-school things to focus on and a medication adjustment allowed me to clear away some of the fog in my head. When I returned to school spring semester I had made some compromises with myself. I didn’t need worldwide recognition, it didn’t need to be the best thesis ever, it didn’t even need to be that good. All I wanted was to use the skills I was passionate about, learn something new, and remember to enjoy my last semester of college. And in the end the determined and passionate qualities that have always existed in me made sure my thesis project was something I could be proud of.
The project I ended up coming up with is called Shelf Life, an app and a physical product for keeping track of food in consumers’ kitchens, in hopes that this will allow for consumers to more often use food they have before it is forgotten and goes bad. You can read more about it here.
I know there are a lot of IMM students who don’t believe thesis should be treated as seriously as I did, that it’s not worth the stress and commitment when in truth it is very difficult not to pass. But I have always believed that projects like this should only marginally have to do with what is required of you, and that the majority of effort you put in is because you want to improve yourself, and go one extra mile so you can go one more on the next project.
My advice to future students going through my program and others like it: go the extra mile to make something you are proud of for you, because deep down you are aware of your potential and others should see what you are capable of. But don’t do it for the recognition in of itself. Never strive for perfection, because you will always have to make compromises with yourself and others, and your definition of perfection is super subjective and probably unobtainable anyway. Finally, know that when you struggle you are not struggling alone. I would not have gotten through that semester without the support I got from so many people, and I slowly learned that I was not the only one silently struggling. Reach out for support and to support others, whether or not you are going through a crisis, as we can all benefit from helping one another, and make your potential known.
If you’re going through something similar I’d be happy to talk to you more about my experience. Thanks for reading.
hello.kerrin@gmail.com | kerrinrose.com
