Every spring, hundreds of fourth-years turn in their theses, research-based projects that sometimes take years of preparation to complete. For students in some majors, the thesis is a requirement for graduation. In others, students can choose whether to write a thesis or complete an alternative project. For many STEM students, however, a thesis is not required other than to qualify for departmental honors upon graduation.
The Maroon spoke with professors, thesis advisors, and students across multiple University divisions to better understand how the thesis process differs among disciplines and to learn more about what topics students in these majors are writing their theses on.
English Language and Literature
The thesis program in the Department of English Language and Literature is overseen by Writing and Research Advisor Nell Pach and Writing and Research Advisor Sylvie Boulette.
Pach said that the thesis writing process usually starts at the end of students’ third year, and advisors like herself and Boulette aim to get students writing as soon as they begin researching their topic. In the autumn quarter of students’ fourth year, the English department holds exercises and workshops intended to ease students into the writing process.
Elizabeth Harrison, a fourth-year double-major in English language and literature and Classics, wrote a joint thesis on The Trojan Women, an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides. Harrison ended her third year knowing she wanted this to be her primary text but was unsure of what she wanted to say about it. Over the summer, Harrison pored over academic articles trying to find a compelling and original argument for her thesis.
“There was one iteration when I was like, ‘how does The Trojan Women mimic the funeral process?’ Then I read a paper that was just that,” Harrison said. “Then there were a couple other instances when I had an idea and then I went to research it, and it was a fully formed paper already.”
By the end of autumn quarter, Harrison decided to write about how the character Cassandra in The Trojan Women was unable to lament and express herself to the other female characters in the play. She began by researching and reading anything on Cassandra and the use of lamentation in ancient Greek tragedy she could find, crafting her argument as she worked.
Pach and Boulette meet one-on-one with students as often as they need and hold regular peer workshops where they encourage students to discuss their ideas with one another and obtain peer feedback.
“We really like to emphasize that the thesis year is an intellectual community that you get to be part of,” Pach said. “You’re not isolated, you’re not off on a mountaintop trying to come up with what you want to say. You are in conversation with other people.”
For an English thesis, students often formulate their research question around a particular primary text, multiple texts, or a single author.
“I like to emphasize [that] by the time you’re a junior or senior year English major, you’re becoming an expert in your field, and you’ve chosen one particular thing that you want to say something about,” Pach said. “You can really think of yourself as in a collegial conversation with the critics who have gone before you.”
Students begin the writing process with a close reading of their primary text, analyzing it through the lens of a secondary piece of critical writing. By the end of autumn quarter, students turn in a portfolio that includes the introduction to their thesis and a revised version of their initial thesis proposal.
In the winter, students begin writing their full draft, turning in around five pages at a time to their advisor. Students have the first few weeks of spring quarter to revise their drafts, with the final 25-page version due at the end of fourth week.
Pach said that given the thesis is often the longest piece of writing students have produced by this point in their academic career, she tries to encourage students to have fun with the process and test the boundaries of what they believe a thesis should be.
“What’s most exciting to me is students who have something that they’re excited about, who come in and say, ‘I found this crazy text in a class. We read it, but I didn’t feel like I really had enough time to do it justice in the paper I wrote about it. I want to spend a year thinking about it,’” Pach said.
Pach encourages students with double majors to write a joint thesis and “customize” the thesis-writing process in whatever way serves them best. English advisors are flexible with different length requirements, topics, and deadlines.
Harrison said her experience with writing a joint thesis was pretty smooth, although she did at times have to communicate with both departments to get certain aspects of her outline approved, such as footnote type and the close reading portion.
Pach said that some of the biggest obstacles students face when writing an English thesis include writing anxiety, not settling on a topic early enough, having too many primary texts of interest, or simply not knowing what research tools and resources are available to them.
Pach said she wants students to have time to explore and experiment with their research question before they finalize their topic but warns students against taking too long with the deliberation process. This, along with writing anxiety, are reasons why the English department has established incremental deadlines and frequent advisor meetings throughout the writing process.
Above all, Pach encourages students to be ambitious with their research.
“When we evaluate theses, we’re looking at not just how well you [did] it but also what the vision [was] and [if] you challenged yourself,” Pach said.
“I think [the thesis] can make your undergrad experience feel unified,” Pach added. “It’s not just you taking a bunch of classes. It’s you building toward something in which you become a little bit of an expert by the end of the process.”
Harrison said turning in her thesis felt like a bittersweet ending to her time at UChicago.
“On one hand, it’s kind of a relief because I can operate in the world without having a thing that I have to do always at all times,” Harrison said. “I can engage in activities and not be doing my thesis which has been nice.… But on the other hand, I really, really… enjoyed writing and researching and sitting in fuzzy socks and being really stressed [about] getting it done. Revising and editing, that was really fun for me.”
Harrison advised second- and third-years beginning to think about their own theses to start writing early, find an advisor that they have rapport with, and choose a topic they are passionate about.
Public Policy
Students majoring in public policy have the option of completing a B.A. thesis or participating in the quarter-long project seminar course. Maria Bautista, a senior research associate at the Harris School of Public Policy, is the thesis faculty lead for public policy majors.
Bautista encourages students to start thinking about their potential thesis topic in their third year so they can begin researching over the summer. Public policy students often choose topics related to their area of specialization, a three-course requirement in the major.
“This has to be a topic that you’re really passionate about because if you’re unsure, or you’re doing it because someone told you it was a good idea, but you don’t feel that this is something that you really want to pursue, you will lose interest or the enthusiasm about pursuing the same topic for the next nine months or [the] next year,” Bautista said.
Bautista advises students on many different public policy topics every year and tries to match undergraduates with graduate student preceptors based on areas of interest.
Public policy student Jack McDonald wrote his thesis on oil and gas regulation and the environmental impacts of Texas’s oil industry. He chose the topic because he and his family used to live on the Barnett Shale in North Texas, known as “the birthplace of modern fracking.”
“I was really interested in the process by which Texas promulgates and generates regulations and then how those regulations are enforced and implemented,” McDonald said.
McDonald began working on his project last summer while he was working for an environmental nonprofit, Oilfield Witness, and noticed discrepancies in how the Railroad Commission of Texas regulates permits for “flaring,” the process by which natural gas is burnt during oil and gas exploration and production.
Bautista works with her students during autumn quarter of their fourth year as they write their research questions. She then tasks them with drafting smaller pieces of what will become their thesis.
In winter quarter, students typically begin drafting larger sections of their thesis with help from their faculty advisor and preceptor. Bautista also helps facilitate lectures to give students ideas on research methods and stays in constant communication with preceptors to get a general sense of what issues students are facing and what guidance they may need.
In the first week of February, Bautista hosts the Winter Symposium, a small conference where students present their research to peers and faculty. Bautista says that the symposium gives students a deadline for polishing their research and methods in an environment where they might be questioned or pushed on their topic by others.
McDonald said he enjoyed presenting his own research at the symposium and hearing other students talk about their research.
“I was just floating around Harris, seeing all sorts of different presentations and getting to see all sorts of different projects,” McDonald said. “Once my group was done, I went and saw some projects that were just in a totally different world from what I was doing.”
After the Winter Symposium, students produce another draft of their thesis to receive peer and advisor feedback, so they know what still needs to be modified or added. In the first few weeks of the spring quarter, students edit and submit their final drafts.
Bautista said common challenges students face while writing their thesis include difficulty securing interviews, framing their research question, and obtaining existing data sets. She often finds that students worry their contribution to existing scholarship on their topic is not relevant or worthy or being shared. Still, the main emphasis of writing a public policy thesis is on producing some kind of analysis that is new and has never been done before.
McDonald said his biggest obstacle was navigating the Railroad Commission of Texas’s publicly available data on permits. To go through the over 13,000 permits in the system, McDonald wrote a Python script to automatically pull the permits he was interested in.
“That was a really, really big change that I made,” McDonald said. “That totally changed the way I was thinking about this and the scale I was able to do this at.”
McDonald urges any students writing a thesis to turn to their faculty advisors if they ever need any guidance or encouragement.
“The faculty are excited about this stuff,” McDonald said. “You come to UChicago because you’re excited about undergraduate research in part… and I think that that’s also true of faculty members. They get excited when you go to them and you talk about your [research].”
Bautista views public policy theses as particularly special because they encourage students to think about tangible policies that can solve real-world problems.
“We are trying to embrace all types of research ideas, and we just want to encourage the student to pursue what they want to do research on,” Bautista said. “We want them to think hard to get all that theoretical knowledge into something practical… and to be grounded in observations that they have from the real world.”
McDonald said even research on topics that seem straightforward can yield important conclusions that contribute to existing literature on the subject.
“Just because the thing that you’re looking at seems obvious doesn’t mean that it’s not important,” McDonald said. “Being able to prove that Texas is doing something bad with environmental regulation is like ‘duh,’ but also it’s something that is important to get out there and study rigorously.”
Bautista further underscores the fact that public policy theses have the ability to incorporate voices that are marginalized, underrepresented, and crucial to the conversation.
“You might think that this is just a matter of connecting, of completing a 50-page document, but doing a thesis on public policy also has to do with learning about people’s experiences, struggles, happiness, motivations, and what has been beautiful is that most of the students are able to incorporate those experiences into their own work, and we are able to listen to the voices of people in different communities and economic sectors,” Bautista said.
Chemistry
John Anderson (S.B., S.M. ’08), an assistant professor and associate chair in the Department of Chemistry, oversees the honors thesis process of Chemistry students. To obtain a degree in chemistry with departmental honors, students must conduct, present, and defend their thesis.
Anderson, who wrote his own honors chemistry thesis when he was a student in the College, said the intentionally flexible thesis process has not changed much since he was an undergraduate. The span of possible topics continues to get wider every year as more chemistry discoveries are made, so the chemistry department purposely leaves requirements adaptable to allow for students to lean into their creativity and dive deep into their research.
Students completing an honors thesis in chemistry often start much earlier than students in other non-STEM majors, sometimes even in their first year. The department expects students to conduct unique and new research projects aimed at making new chemical discoveries.
To get chemistry students thinking about their theses early on, the chemistry department holds an open house during autumn quarter to talk to students about how to get involved in research.
Unlike other majors, the chemistry department does not allow its students to write joint theses. Because writing a thesis is not a requirement to complete the chemistry major or many other STEM majors, it only counts for receiving a degree with departmental honors.
Every year, Anderson sees a myriad of topics from students, including physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and more.
“I think one of the interesting things about chemistry, the old trope, is that it’s called the central science… because it bridges so many adjacent disciplines,” Anderson said. “One of the things that I like most about the honors thesis process is seeing the span of research and seeing all of the different things that people are doing and how it’s all anchored in chemistry.”
Fourth-year chemistry student Ry Papadopoulos began research at a biochemistry lab in her second year. As a third-year, she started working for the lab that now supports her thesis research.
Papadopoulos used in-situ infrared (IR) spectroscopy, a method by which the absorption and emission of light waves in the infrared spectral range are studied. In Papadopoulos’s project, IR spectroscopy allowed her to examine the structure of carbon electrodes in order to better understand the connection between structural motifs and electrochemical performance.
“I decided to do this work because I really was attracted to the level of precision with which chemistry can answer a lot of questions about the world in a way that can actually be beneficial as well,” Papadopoulos said.
Papadopoulos says that the thesis writing process helped her develop as an independent scientist. A normal “thesis day” mainly consisted of running experiments and analyzing and writing up the results. She did not actually start writing her thesis until the beginning of spring quarter.
“The theses in the chemistry department are pretty exceptional,” Anderson said. “We have students that travel nationally to go to the Department of Energy labs to do synchrotron experiments to get the data that they need for their thesis. We have students who write theses that have to stay confidential for two years because their results are going to go into a startup company, and there’s intellectual property associated with it. We have students researching drug resistance and new technologies and all of these things. So I think this is a testament to our faculty and our students.”
The biggest obstacle Anderson sees for his students is that producing fundamentally new research and making new discoveries is challenging and time-consuming.
“It’s not just a paper that they write—there has to be real data, computational data, experimental data,” Anderson said. “It typically requires a year or in many cases longer for one to generate that data and make sure that it’s real, analyze it, interpret it, and understand how that fits into the broader scientific literature so it’s a hard process.”
Papadopoulos wishes she had asked more people for feedback on her research methods and writing throughout the process. She also said her biggest obstacle had been feeling confident in her findings, given that her research, like much other research in the field, is incomplete.
“It’s understandable that this is a work in progress at that point, and you can feel uncomfortable as a scientist to report something that isn’t a complete story yet or that you might want to reproduce or confirm through a second separate experiment or technique,” Papadopoulos said. “It doesn’t need to be perfect and complete.”
Anderson sees “something magical” in the opportunity to conduct original research and discover something completely new as an undergraduate student.
“Scientific research, at least for me as an undergraduate… was the gateway for science,” Anderson said. “The first time you do a reaction in a lab, and you make something that no one has ever made before, you’re the first person in the history of humanity to have made that compound. It’s completely intoxicating, and that’s what set me on my path.”
