An Ode to Abandoned Theses

Having the opportunity to study in a Master’s Program is so often treated like the pinnacle of opportunity. Suddenly, one has the access, funding, and resources to study whatever incredibly niche topic your heart so desires. Just make sure it is something you are actually able to do.

Wait, what?

So many go into graduate school deeply passionate about some topic. A Master’s Degree sounds so much more elegant and refined than a Bachelor's Degree. The purpose is not merely taking some classes, but to focus on a thesis topic. Some need to start the program to select a thesis, while others have a topic selected even before their undergraduate years began. There is great excitement in knowing that one can truly focus in on a hyper-specific topic more involved than one’s undergraduate years permitted, whether or not a Capstone project was a part of it. It sounds so very free.

However, upon starting one’s thesis, the assumption of freedom slowly disappears. So often, one is hindered by access. Naturally, citing one’s sources and being as accurate as possible is deeply important at this level. Students are blessed with free access to academic papers the way that the general public is not. However, secondary to accuracy in importance is originality. No amount of access to already-written academic journals can create that originality, which is where the difficulty in access stems. From here, students must go out and do their own research, travel to locations to take measurements and make observations, conduct interviews, or contact other researchers for their data depending on what the study involves.

Suddenly, the limitations become all too apparent. Attempts to reach out to others for their input is sometimes met with radio silence. Time constraints force projects to reduce scale. Common refrains aimed at projects deemed too ambitious include “that sounds more like a PhD-level project” or even “maybe you can do this when you become a professor.” It feels like being trapped in a multi-level marketing scheme with more prestige attached and, depending on the institution, state funding.

If one is fortunate, these realizations come early on, perhaps before one’s proposal has even been made. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes projects have already been well under way, a large portion of the preliminary research already completed. Only upon moving to the next step are the limitations revealed. A pinnacle piece of research proves unattainable. A slew of potential interviewees do not respond. The final potential member of one’s committee, the one specifically sought for their particular expertise, points out all of the holes in the premise. Suddenly a thesis project that felt nearly complete falls apart. 

Finding a new topic is not necessarily too difficult. In any given academic’s mind, there are plenty of topics for projects floating around, some more attainable than others. The problem then is not even “what will my new thesis topic be?” so much as “what do I do with all of this now?” There may very well be a PhD or professor research topic, depending on one’s life goals or why the project was rejected to begin with. Perhaps it can be turned into the basis for a special lecture or a thinkpiece for the opinion section of a newspaper. One recalls how many video essayists are current or former academics. Perhaps some of their famous video essays are abandoned theses. One would hate to see all of that time spent on research and all of that knowledge gained go to waste.