You will need time to identify ideas and secure a thesis advisor prior to starting the thesis. It’s recommended to meet with the WGS Program Manager during your junior year to start this process. 

The thesis writing occurs over two semesters, typically the fall and spring semesters of your senior year. Some students begin background work in their junior year.

Think about topics that interest you! It could be something from a class that you want to explore deeper, an idea from an internship or job, or based in outside reading/research you’ve done. Set up an informational meeting with the WGS Program Manager to discuss the thesis process, your questions, and the ideas you have. You do not need to settle on an idea before the meeting, in fact it’s best to come with a range of ideas. 

You will need to enroll in the humanities pre-thesis tutorial in the fall (21.THT) and the Undergraduate Thesis in Humanities (21.THU) in the spring of your senior year.

THT and THU are worth 6 and 12 units respectively. For the Pre-thesis Tutorial, you can check in weekly with your advisor and follow a set of deadlines.  Expect to do most of your research early in the thesis-writing process. Students can learn how to refine research skills using a variety of library databases and/or archives, depending on the topic. In THT, much of your focus will be on completing an initial review of literature pertinent to the thesis topic, and refining the research question. All thesis students must turn in an annotated bibliography and initial draft of 15-25 pages representing their work in progress to their advisor by the last day of reading period in the fall term.

For the Thesis Tutorial in the spring (21.THU) you will be working mostly with your advisor on finalizing drafts.  At this stage your initial research will have been completed, so the focus of the semester will be primarily on writing and revision.  The extent to which you will meet with your advisor will largely be determined by you and your advisor to keep the thesis moving along. A finished thesis will range between 30-60 pages.

The thesis deadline is determined by the MIT Academic Calendar and is typically a few days prior to the last day of classes. 

Finding a research question that is interesting to you, interesting to others in the fields you are working in, has not been answered already, and can feasibly be addressed in six months of active research is not an easy task. Many students find that this is one of the hardest parts of the process.

Avoid the temptation to narrow your search too fast.

Ask yourself what broad subject areas interest you the most: sexuality studies? gender and the environment? social justice? gender in film and/or literature? the history of science? The search at this point should be more specific than a sub-field (“I’m interested in the environment”) but less specific than a real research question (“How have environmental regulations in North Dakota impacted the formation of family units among Indigenous populations?”).

Once you have one or two broad areas, find multiples to read. Literature, newspapers, journals, documentaries—anything that seems relevant. You want to know what questions people who care about this subject think are important. You also want to know the kinds of evidence, arguments, and critical frameworks people have used before.  What kind of information and sources do reporters draw on, what theoretical frames have scholars used to approach the topic, what fields did they come from and how has this affected the questions they asked/didn’t ask?

After a couple of weeks of this, you’ll be considerably more knowledgeable.  Then you can start brainstorming specific research questions. Make a list of ideas. Talk about them with your advisor, peers, and professors. If you can explain your topic to someone who isn’t knowledgeable about the topic, that’s a good sign. If they think it’s interesting, that’s even better.

As soon as you can articulate a handful of broad subject areas that interest you, you should talk with faculty members.  The goal should be to talk to as many as possible.  Don’t worry at this point about who will be the advisor.  Send emails (keep these short, save the details for talking in person) and make appointments. Faculty members are busy and often hard to pin down, so make an appointment to meet sooner rather than later.  You don’t need to have taken their course. Faculty love talking about research and creative ideas, and talking with students is their job. You can browse potential advisors and their fields of expertise on our website.

When meeting with faculty, be prepared to talk about your areas of interest. If you’d like, write up a single page summarizing your interests to prepare and organize your thoughts. When finding an advisor, you don’t need to propose specific research questions. You want to find out what parts of this topic they find interesting, what work has been done, and what directions they think you should go in next.

It’s good to feel comfortable with your advisor.  You can read over their CVs and a few of their recent papers before meeting with them to have a sense of their interests and why they might be a good fit for your thesis topics of interest. You can ask them questions about their own work – whether specific or just “what kinds of things are you working on these days?”  Faculty members always enjoy talking about their research.

By the end of September, you should choose your advisor.  If you need assistance finding a faculty advisor, contact WGS Faculty Director. You will need to have this faculty member sign the Thesis Registration Form by October 15th.

The tasks and commitment to your thesis will evolve over time – you will work at a steady pace while researching and reading in the fall, shift to predominantly writing in the early spring, and then leave ample time for editing and proofing later in the spring semester.

Try to start writing as soon as you can, even if what you’re writing isn’t perfect immediately. Early writing could include annotations/notes on sources you plan to use, definition of terms, explanatory or summary paragraphs about the topic or debates in the field that impact your argument, or early drafts of your approach to answering the research question you have identified. 

Using ‘reading/research’ as a way to put off writing is one of the most common forms procrastination takes.  You can experiment with approaches to an argument many times before you and your advisor arrive at the best framework and organizational structure for your paper. Think of writing down your ideas and experimenting with the structure and even the content of your argument as an exercise. Your final paper will be a lot less convoluted if you work out some of this before you set about writing your final draft.

Remember that your thesis may not follow the path you expect. You may set out to answer one question, find that what interests you is a second one, abandon that for lack of sources, and then stumble into a third. This is what research and writing is about.

Most importantly, remember that we are all here to help you.  This includes faculty, your thesis advisor, the WGS Director, and WGS staff (x3-8844) or wgs@mit.edu. If you have any questions or concerns, just ask someone.