On February 4th, 2021 both idiots submitted their 10000-word long politics dissertations after a long 8 months of ignoring all related responsibilities until it became too difficult to do so.
Were there positives to this project? Sure.
It is part of our degree so we needed to do it, we could choose a topic we liked, and we got a few good wine nights out of coping with the stress.
However, what we want to talk to you about is all the things we hated, and how we weren’t properly prepared for the onslaught we endured courtesy of our politics department.
To prepare us for this debacle, the university decided to do one course in the first semester of our third year dedicated to research methods. Chaos ensued. We can’t remember a single thing we were taught with the only lasting memories from those few months being the multiple times we cried in the heavy demand section of the library together because we didn’t know what to do. OH! And who could forget the time the fire alarm went off in Lucy’s flat three times while we were completing the mandatory online quiz. Regardless, two bad experiences with staff, one tutorial where we failed to make a bar graph and lots of running to Tesco for spaghetti carbonara later, we left the course with a decent grade.
I think we were supposed to be learning about methodology in the research course but I still couldn’t give you a definition of the word if you had a gun to my head. This was the biggest mind bend as statistics and numbers were thrown at us left right and centre and made life hell when it came to writing our own dissertations.
Then, miss Rona made her presence known! Pushing our deadline back three weeks, and making the whole process that much more taxing. Sure, we enjoyed the extra three weeks, as we spent it wisely lying-in bed, but it made the pain last longer as our diss’ became a never-ending hindrance to our lives.
Iona can honestly say that at no point did she have a genuine clue about what she was doing with her diss. She read books, she read interviews, she wrote stuff down, but does she know what was going on? Absolutely not. Due to the traumatic experience of the research course, and the perpetual bubble of isolation and doom that the pandemic created, there was a massive disconnect between what was expected and what felt achievable. Crisis ensured cherubs!
This led to the both of us feeling high levels of stress with little place to relieve it, where were the Charlie Sheen shots when we needed them?! Instead, we looked for other avenues to relieve stress. Buying stupid hats for themed nights, making horrid cocktails and making a routine of watching the Great British Bake Off on Iona’s laptop propped up on a dining room chair. None of this stopped is crying over missed punctuation
And to top it all off, the impending doom surrounding the universities decision to stop the no-detriment policy means we really aren’t living the aberdream. So, was the dissertation process idiot approved?
NEVER. Abolish dissertations for the social sciences. No one needs to write 10000 words on politics unless they are Aristotle.