*Small disclaimer: This is an unpublished draft from May 2018 that I’ve worked over – I am now a PhD student, but I still sort of agree with my three things here, and I have definitely used points 2) and 3) in my master’s degree. Anyway, moving on!*
Dissertation is that spooky word that starts appearing far too frequently halfway through your second year at university, and gets decidedly more scary every time you hear it. In all honestly, my experience writing my dissertation was quite a mess, but I like to believe that after a year of stress and chaos, I’m at least equipped to give some warnings (or advice).
1) Your dissertation doesn’t have to matter.
As much as everyone makes it out to be a big, big deal; as much as the third year students you know post fancy pictures of them handing in their dissertations; as much as you hear about that one person last year who got an essay based on their dissertation published in a magazine, your undergraduate dissertation is not the end-all be-all of university. Maybe you have found „your topic“ that you are immensely passionate about, and if you have, that is amazing! Make the most of it! However, maybe you haven’t – and that can be just as exciting!
Take a shot at a few topics you might find interesting, look into them, talk to your advisor, and pick one that seems promising, or fun, or like you could talk about it for a while. And if halfway through your dissertation you realize that your academic or social passion lies elsewhere, that is not the end of the world! You can find your passion in third year, and fully delve into it during your master’s degree, or job, or just during your free time – you don’t need an undergrad dissertation to be passionate about a subject!
2) Keep track of what you write.
A dissertation is written over multiple months, so it’s only to be expected that you forget little bits of what you write. What helped me a lot was to keep a separate document on an online notepad, on which I recapped every paragraph I wrote into one single sentence. That meant that whenever I came back to write, I could remind myself of everything I had written so far very easily, and make sure that all my chapters matched. It helped so much in writing a comprehensive literature review to my results and analysis, and in making sure that all threats were tied together at the end.
Another handy thing about my little list of paragraphs was that when it came to finalising my dissertation, especially with making sure everything was in the right place. By reading through only the paragraph recaps, I realized that there were some unnecessary paragraphs in my literature review, and I noticed that by swapping around some of the result paragraphs I could make a much clearer argument for what I was trying to do!
3) Don’t be afraid of writing everything twice (if you have the time).
This is a big ask, and I certainly didn’t do it for my entire dissertation! The big things that I rewrote completely were my introduction and literature review. This was partly because I had written my first lit review draft over the course of four and a half days, because it was a formative assignment in the middle of summative season, and I changed my dissertation topic midway through December (don’t do that). But, more importantly, it was because once I’d done my interviews, and experiment, and analysis, and discussion, really only half of my literature review was still relevant.
I’m going to be honest, re-doing something you thought you’d finished sucks, and throwing out a third of your references also sucks, and having to go and find some new references when you’re two weeks away from handing in your dissertation also sucks. But it is so worth it! Writing a more ‚retrospective‘ literature review that covers all the things that you later talk about in your discussion makes the entire dissertation look so much more smooth, and it makes you look like you know what you’re talking about.
And it’s not just the content, it’s the writing style too! Rewriting anything from what you’ve written already means that you have more brain-space to dedicate to making the sentences happen. The ideas are there, the sources are there, so it felt so much easier to me with my knowledge of the coming chapters to make all my paragraphs neater, and reconfigure all the half-ideas I wrote down the first time into properly structured full ideas.
There’s my three tips for writing an undergraduate dissertation in the social sciences, having just finished it myself. Do you have any more tips and tricks? Leave the in the comments!
*Mary from the future again: I’m setting out to do a similar post for my Master’s dissertation – let me know if you have any questions or topics you’d like me to get into*
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