Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Thesis work, planning for the future, and PhD thoughts

The comic Age of Bronze
   As it gets closer and closer to the end of my MA Degree it occurred to me that I needed to work on my Thesis. One of the principle aspects of getting a Masters Degree is that you devote a large body of time to the creation of a Thesis project that combines the sum total of your diverse research and writing skills.
With my own research I wanted to look at different aspects of how graphic novels preserve Greek myth. In my own experience I wanted to show the mutability of myth and how, through comics, there exists avenues of shaping and re-explaining Greek stories for new audiences that merge various texts.  The story of how and why these  accounts have existed in their different forms has always interested me and so I wanted to explore the pedagogical responses this offers.

If you decide to go through with a Thesis project you should take into account the possibilities your campus allows you. For example, while I am still waiting to make sure that many aspects of my thesis can work out, I know that I needed to find professors that would support my ideas and who could also be able to help me explain my interests. If you decide on the Thesis path, again, check to make sure that your campus has individuals who can help you.

With the different possibilities of research you as a student have, be sure to push yourself and make sure that you are prepared to write as much as a Thesis requires.

Another important thing to understand about a Thesis is that is will be a lot of writing. Some Thesis projects require anywhere from 50 to 75 pages of written research. While as an English Major this does not seem too daunting to me, it can be positively terrifying to many other people from many different majors.

Next, consider where you want your Thesis work to lead you. In my own case I purposefully want to do a Masters Thesis to accommodate my own PhD interests, hence both my topic of interest (I suspect it will help me should I apply for certain schools) and my interest in pedagogical research. If you want your Thesis work to be capable of helping your PhD interests, go for it. I am purposefully trying to make sure 25 pages of my Thesis work can be part of a writing sample that I will send off to different schools (some schools have limits on how big a sample they can be sent).

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