Last Reflection for Senior Thesis
Keeping in line with my personality, I am really not going mince words here. I am also not going to write academically. Hopefully seniors next year will read this and get something out of it. That’s the whole reason I’m writing this.
It seemed for many people Senior Thesis was a lot more stress than it needed to be. It shouldn’t be that way. Thesis is not supposed to be stressful nor is it supposed to be busy work. We are not in middle school or high school. We do not need to do 4 months of busy work before we start a passion project. It does take planning, but everyone works differently. I just needed to catch the first spark of passion and it was off to the races from there. It took a me a full dedicated week of research to come up with a plan of attack for my app and it turned out better than I could have ever imagined.
The blog posts in the first semester defiantly helped me stay on track, but in the second semester it was just unnecessary busy work. Having to bounce between Medium and Basecamp for me was pointless. I had so much done on my own that I didn’t need anyone looking over my shoulder. This is not a blogging class and it shouldn’t weight heavy in the grade. The work seen in the Showcase should be the total weight of the grade. If you worked hard, it will show, if you mailed it in, it will also show.
The research for the information within the app took about two and a half months and there is copy I didn’t even use in the app yet, that is already typed up and saved.
Backtracking for a second, I started off making an interactive story with some AR / VR add-ins to make it more immersive. I had not thought about a baseball app yet and it wasn’t even in my initial brainstorms. About ten thousand words into the story, I realized it was not what I wanted to do and totally scrapped the idea. It was then I realized why Sanders wanted us to start working early. A lot of people in the first semester were scrapping ideas in the first few weeks and working on other things. Others, realized their original ideas needed to be refined and they did that early, greatly helping them down the line.
That’s where my advice comes in. Get started early. Most of the time your first idea is not going to be the one that you are going to be working on the entire year. Knowing that in October versus March or April is night and day in terms of stress. I developed a Baseball app with about 40 thousand words of copy and 175 art-boards that are all interconnected and interactive. If I didn’t start developing in mid-October, collecting information and getting things down on paper, I may never have finished when I did.
In my eyes, my Senior Thesis was a culmination of everything I learned here at The College and that’s what it should be for everyone. It should be something you are passionate about and will work hard to see it completed. I found my love for baseball in the process of making my app. The project you work on should be something that makes you excited to get up and work on. Something that fuels you even when you are tired.
If you don’t have that passion for anything, then you need to evaluate yourself and the you are in because everyone should be passionate about something. Maybe Thesis can help you find that passion for something. I am not the expert, but the best projects seem to be the ones that people where passionate about.
Personally, I am a madman when it comes to work ethic. Ask anyone that knows I have two official jobs at The College, I tutor grad students in writing, I write sports for two different publications, and I was a part of multiple clubs on campus, holding chair positions. With all that was on my plate, I still worked an average of at least 10 hours a week on my project. Over winter break I dedicated at least 5 hours a day. I just wanted to show up at the showcase with the best possible project that I could get. Not everyone can do what I did, but at least like 5 hours of week from the beginning. Five hours of honest work not half-committed work.
Additionally, if you are a senior and you let your summers go to waste up until now, what are you doing? I had three internships by my senior year. The summer internships at any company are chances to learn and make money while building skills to be in the workforce. Experience and skills set you apart from your peers. Don’t waste your breaks when you could be improving yourself. That’s not to say you can’t relax every now and again, but the job market is incredibly competitive, don’t miss out on your dream job because you didn’t put in the work beforehand.
Lastly, enjoy your senior year. Enjoy it for what it is. For some of us it’s the last of our formal education. For others it’s another step toward the ultimate goal of success. For all of us, it is a time of reflection and further self growth.
