#postgraduate

Starting a PhD in January, let's add learning Latin to the to-do list to keep things fun! I currently do not have a desk, but I quite enjoy my little setup (of course feating lofigirl)

the end of an era

On May 23 I finished my undergraduate degree, somehow managing to double major in History and French with minors in Linguistics and International Relations. I’m so glad I got to go to the college I chose (and particularly grateful for scholarships!), because I got to meet and live with some very lovely people. The college I went to gave me access to the best academic experiences of my life: a summer internship working for my prof on an archaeological site in Türkiye & a 6 month semester in Paris, France.

I had plenty of hard times— I can’t say that I am a good student, but college has made me confident to say that I can be a good scholar. In September, I will be starting a masters program in Iron Age Archaeology, which I am genuinely thrilled about (and I hardly ever use that word). I expect that next year will be even harder academically than anything I’ve done so far, but I’m so excited to try.

I was very surprised because I remember my psych degree thesis having to be longer than that, not even to mention my other 3 master thesis, one being over 40 pages long.

Executive dysfunction and the paralysing fear of academic failure really play against me, because I've been terrified of starting to work on my thesis because I was scared of how much I had to do in such a short time and it turns out it's not even that long🥲

I'm an English major who's currently pursuing a postgrad degree. The final year of my postgrad course will commence from July. So this means I'll have to submit a thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, by next year. Can y'all please suggest some ideas for the topic of the thesis? 😅 What are some good themes or concepts that I could work on? Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Please DM me, send me asks or interact with this post, if you can help.

— 08/01/25

master's (1 thesis, research framework + 6 topics, 3000 words per topic)

pros - i get a qualification, i can work with my favourite professor again

cons - need to use my real name, a lot of boring parts and structure i don't feel like doing, time pressure, need to finish all my points before sharing it

book (same thing but no formal research section, maybe i could ramble a bit?)

pros - i don't have to do the lit review or methodologies sections (can skip straight to my points), could use a pen name so no doxxing required, it's officially published all in one place

cons - need to wait until everything's done to get any feedback, honestly i've never seen this kind of thing (super in depth character analysis) as a book before so idk which publisher would pick it up

articles (6 articles, 3000-3500 words per article)

pros - less time pressure/don't need to completely finish before people can see it

cons - real name issue, this might not be considered serious enough for anyone to publish, would be serialised so would require multiple applications to all succeed

blog posts/substack? (20+ posts - one for each point, variable in length but probably around 1000 words per point)

pros - most accessible to the widest range of people, can do it in my own time, don't have to doxx myself at all, might be able to split it even smaller into individual points per post instead of 3+ point essays, can make claims without needing to back it up with hard evidence (eg when is tsh set?), if enough people want it i could self publish so it's got potential to be a book anyway

cons - literally no academic validation, whatever i write will count as a non scholarly source even if it's the exact same as what i would've had published, puts it further down on my priorities list