A Week in the Life: Undergrad Research
Being a student always feels like a lot of work, but being a senior in college is a special kind of overwhelming. I’m double majoring in Classical Archaeology and Middle Eastern studies, which is a lot on its own, but I’m also currently writing a thesis about the University of Michigan excavations at Karanis (which you can read more about here). Ever since I’ve been telling people about my decision to write an Honors thesis this year, I’ve gotten the same kind of question over and over again:
“Yeah, but how are you going to have time for all that?”
“Is it hard to find the time to actually work on your project?”
“You’re already so busy! How can you possibly fit that into your schedule?”
There are lot of advice posts out there for graduate students writing their doctoral dissertations, on how to schedule your days and when to make time for writing, but far less from undergrads talking about their experiences writing their senior theses. People will recommend lots of different things: going for a run to clear your head, writing as soon as you wake up in the morning, making sure your desk is in a room you associate purely with work, so on and so on. There’s a lot of great tips and tricks out there, but the truth of the matter is that no two people work exactly the same way, and something that works great for one person isn’t going to work for another. So, instead of giving you a list of advice or ‘dos & don’ts’, I thought I’d tell you about what a regular week looks like for me and how my thesis work fits into that. A lot of the time I still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing, and some days it’s really hard to find enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you take one thing away from this post, I hope you realize that it’s totally possible to find time to write a thesis, even if you’re not a mega-organized person or someone who schedules themselves from the minute they wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night.
Monday:
Mondays are really important for me because I don’t have class, meaning I have the majority of the day to work. I get up quite early, around 6 am every day, because I’ve learned over the years that mornings are when I work best. I know how busy I can get during the week, so I spend a lot of the weekend trying to get ahead on readings and assignments. Right now I’m only taking three classes, but they’re all 400 level classes so they involve a decent amount of work. This week, for example, I’ve got just under 230 pages of reading to do, plus about five pages of translation for my ancient Greek class. How much of this I get done over the weekend honestly depends on how much I’ve got going on, so usually my morning on Mondays is spent finishing off the things I didn’t get to over the weekend.
Around 11 am I’ll break for lunch, and when I’m done with that I’ll spend a couple of hours working on things for my thesis. Sometimes this is more reading, sometimes this is writing. Right now I’m finishing off the research for the first chapter I’m going to write, which is due by the end of the semester, so I’m mainly going through excavation reports, lists of artifacts, and the university’s database of papyri. Around 2:30 pm I leave for my job at a K-8 school in town, and the rest of the evening when I get home (around 6 pm) is spent finishing up anything I didn’t get to earlier in the day or anything I immediately need to have done before Tuesday.
Tuesday:
Tuesdays are quite a bit busier for me than Mondays. I have class from 11:30 am until 2:30 pm, and then I work from 3 to 5:30 pm, so my only time for school-related work is either right at the start of my day or right at the end of it. Since I already have to be on campus for class, Tuesday mornings work well if I have anything I need to get done in the Kelsey Museum. This isn’t the case every week, but if I have a bit of time to spare and something I need to find I’ll sometimes work for a couple hours at the Kelsey before I go to class. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in the museum’s archives, where all of the original maps, photographs, and reports of the Karanis excavations are stored. Other times I’m down in storage where all the artifacts that aren’t on display in the museum galleries are kept, either looking at objects related to my thesis or related to another side project I’m working on about Karanis.
Wednesday:
Meeting days! It’s purely by accident, but Wednesdays have ended up becoming my days for meetings. Every Wednesday I meet with my thesis advisor around noon, and so my mornings on Wednesday are usually spent prepping for this meeting. There’s no requirement to say how often you meet with your thesis advisor, and I know a lot of people who can’t stand the ideas of having meetings that often, but I’ve found weekly check-in meetings have helped me tremendously. Part of what makes writing a thesis so difficult (yet also so exciting) is the freedom of it all. Every department is different, and there are some major deadlines you have to hit along the way, but for the most part you’re the one deciding your schedule and when you get things done. Knowing that I’m going to sit down with my advisor every week and tell him about what I’ve done holds me accountable and really pushes me to make sure I complete something on my project every week, even if I’m having a really crazy time. After that I work in the library for a bit before heading to class from 3–6 pm.
Thursday:
My Thursdays are a lot like my Tuesdays in that I have class from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm. I also have an activity on Thursday nights that goes until about 9 pm, so I really only have the mornings to work. Most of my time in the morning is spent prepping everything for the class I teach on Friday mornings, so honestly I don’t get around to doing much on my thesis on Thursdays. Although I like to stick to a policy of ‘do a little bit every day,’ the reality is sometimes you just don’t have time, and that’s okay!
Friday:
Fridays change every week for me, but for the most part they’re pretty open and good days to get things done. My major commitment is teaching, which is new for me and super exciting. This semester I’m teaching a section of Honors 135: Ideas in Honors all about the portrayal of archaeology in popular films. Each week we talk about a different film or film series and the way archaeology is depicted in that film, so a lot of the class is spent watching movie clips and discussing them. It’s a nice change of pace to have at the end of the week, and a good break from everything else I’ve had going on in class. After I teach from 11:30–1, I either stay on campus until I work at 3 or head home and work a bit more on my own. Fridays are the one night that I try to make sure I don’t work too late, which I think has helped a lot overall with my stress levels.
Saturday and Sunday:
As much work as I have going on right now in all of my classes and with my research project, I still try and take at least one day (or as much time as I can a spare) to relax and do something that’s not academic-related. Sometimes that’s going out with a group of friends or having lunch with my family, and sometimes, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, that’s just sitting on my couch and having a Friends marathon. The rest of my weekend, as mentioned earlier, is spent trying to get ahead on things for the rest of the week, including carving out a big chunk of time on Sundays for thesis work. Every now and again I volunteer to go give talks about my research at the Natural History Museum here on campus as part of their Scientist in the Forum series (including one I have coming up this weekend on October 27th!). This is something I started taking part in over the summer as part of the museum’s partnership with the Honors Summer Fellowship program, but I’ve kept volunteering because I’ve discovered how much I like talking to the public about my work. If I’ve been having a particularly rough week and feel like I’m getting nowhere with my project, it’s nice to go along and talk to a group of people who know nothing about my work and hear what they have to say about it. Plus I always learn something new, which is half the fun.
