Maybe saying I survived writing my thesis is an overstatement. Nonetheless, I pushed myself really hard to get something academic-y written. While I was finishing off this behemoth, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I missed doing. Over the last year or so I’ve discovered so much joy in writing articles and during the fortnight from hell I decided to draft a listicle which you are now reading, amongst some other bits and bobs. So let me tell you all about how I survived my thesis!
It’s quite hard when you’re starting from a completely blank page so the first step I took was just writing down absolutely everything I knew about my experiment. Even if it all ended up being overthrown during a re-dra, it at least gave me a jumping off point. This brings me on to my second tip: throughout the write up process, I would finish my days by noting down my exact word count. It was really helpful to keep track of how much I’d completed and how I was progressing each day. This could then help me work out how hard I’d have to work in the upcoming days.
I think at the beginning of the process, I had the most trouble with just wishing I could do absolutely anything else. I needed frequent breaks and when I was working I wasn’t really doing anything of value. If you read one of my last articles, you might know that I’ve sworn myself off of TikTok. In retrospect, this happened at a very valuable time. If I’d been a mild TikTok addict during (not being dramatic) the most important assignment of my life so far then I don’t think things would’ve gone nearly as well. I’d heard about other students just ditching social media entirely for the write-up duration. I didn’t restrict myself quite that much but instead set myself screen time limits. This meant that when I had breaks I was actually doing something useful / proper self care. I tried to use the time to better myself so I’d feel good as I was finishing up the process. I woke myself up everyday by chugging a shit ton of water (I want to say just under a litre?). I also indulged in any sort of little joys like sweet treats or delectable iced drinks. Lastly, I used the time as an opportunity to reset my skin: moisturising and face masks were my new friends.
As I mentioned previously, I’ve been really good about limiting my social media usage. What I did to help motivate myself was instead of lying on my bed watching instagram reels: I meticulously planned my breaks. One of the best ideas I came up with was to watch a movie set in the location of my upcoming holiday. I’m in quite a lucky position where I have something big and fun right at the end of my exam season to look forward to. Meaning that as soon as I’ve finished writing about social psychology I’ll be jetting off to my next city break. So when I took the break and watched the movie, I could sit there knowing that this nightmare would be over soon enough.
On a particularly unsuccessful day, I made a list of everything I had to look forward to as soon as I had my freedom again to help motivate myself.
● I’ll be on holiday in a beautiful place listening to the music I love
● I’ll drink lukewarm fruity cider in a beer garden
● I’ll be taking lots of beautiful photos to look back on
● I’ll hug my friends and tell them how much I love them
● I’ll dance along to my favourite lyrics at a concert
Weirdly enough, I found this technique really helped me and le me a marker to look back on, as well as something to get excited about.
I thought I’d leave my weirdest tip till the end. Just a little unhinged note to leave this on. I can’t tell if I’ve come up with something incredible but I have mastered the MEM technique which stands for “Musical Engagement Model”. Here are some very detailed instructions for trying it out:
1. Make quick playlists that you really enjoy (try for high energy vibes) 2. Press play and put your volume down to the lowest setting it’ll go without muting it 3. For every 20 words you write you can put the volume up by one increment 4. The key detail here is that when the song ends you have to restart the process
My thought here was that it would incentivise me to speed up my writing substantially.
As a side note, this only works if music actually helps you speed up rather than distracts you but I found it worked really well when I just needed to bulk out my word count. I also found a playlist on Spotify that I kept on in the background which I found really helped with my focus. It was called Digital Caffeine which described itself as “Binaural Frequency Brainwave Music”. It sounds a little bit like some weird sci-fi background noise at first but after a few minutes I barely noticed it. The steady, rhythmic tones really helped my concentration, it seemed to block out other distractions without being so interesting that I actually paid attention to them.
So I believe that comes to the end of my rant / listicle / happy decompression. Although writing my thesis caused me an immense amount of stress, I believe that a lot of the anxieties surrounding the thesis comes from all the negative hype surrounding it. All my time studying I’d heard about people writing it all in one day or being totally exhausted by the stress of it all. What I wasn’t expecting was for my project and understanding of the topic to be completely transformed as the weeks passed. It was also a nice way to prove to myself that I do actually understand my degree subject and perhaps I do deserve a qualification at the end of this whole thing. I can genuinely say that I’m really proud of my thesis and hopefully some of my advice can help you along the way!