When you look at a thesis, do you see a 150-to-400 page book with ages of research to be done and complex experiments that need to be performed? Most people do; don’t feel bad. But don’t let yourself become daunted by a thesis. With the proper breaking-down of your thesis into manageable chunks, you too can have your thesis done without going completely insane with worry and stress.

Choose from the four sections below.

This topic needs to be researchable, provable (or disprovable), and doable within a reasonable amount of time (after five years, some universities invalidate your graduate hours; this would be a bad thing). This process involves basic research.

For the sake of argument, say you are a master’s student in the field of Communications. You have chosen to do a thesis, rather than taking the comprehensive exams. (Note that some departments require both a thesis and comps.) Being that you had to write a research proposal and an initial literature review for Quantitative Research Methods, you’ve already got a topic in mind that you like, and that you know something about.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your topic is Internet Privacy Behaviors. You want to do a study on whether or not people’s opinions of Internet Privacy correspond with their actual behaviors. But you can’t just go out and do the study. It may be valid and relevant, but do you know if anyone has actually done the study already? Is there any research available on the topic? Or is it so fresh and new that you’d be doing watershed research in it?

The next thing you need to do, once you’ve picked your topic, is go to the library. (If you have a student ID, you can access WebLUIS from home and do this step from the comfort of your own desk, but working on research at school does remove distractions from your path.) Pull up the campus list of databases and look at Academic Universe, EBSCOHost, WilsonSelectPlus, JStor, and any other databases you feel would be relevant to your research. By clicking on the database icon, you can see what the database covers (JStor is social science, IEEE is computer science, etc.) and see if it is relevant to what you’re doing.

Once you’ve gotten into a database and put in your search terms (and do this several times, in several different ways; different search flags might turn up different articles), skim the articles that come up. See if your study has been done before. Better yet, print out the articles (you can do this free at most campus computer labs) so you have them handy for when you do a literature review – if this topic turns out to be one you can study (if it doesn’t, at least you’ll have the research handy if you should ever need it again). The reason skimming is suggested is a simple one: you don’t need to know every single detail of these studies – yet. You just need to know if your study has been done.

This part’s easy. There are two ways you can go through the process of obtaining one. You can either pick a professor you’ve had in the past, one who you enjoyed learning from and you can stand working with closely over the next six to twelve months, and ask him or her if he or she will be your Thesis Advisor, or you can go to the Graduate Coordinator in your department and ask him or her for a list of possible Thesis Advisors. You’ll probably get a list of names that correspond with fields; find one that works for you, and talk to that person.

It might be best to go to a potential Thesis Advisor with a proposal of some sort. This is not the “official” proposal you have to give to your department and your committee, although it may become one. Instead, it is simply a two to five page memo-style paper, kind of like an abstract or an article critique that you may have already done in one of your graduate classes. Encapsulate what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, and create a quick-and-dirty procedural paragraph about your study’s methodology.

Now, go visit your potential Thesis Advisor. Make sure that he or she has the time and wherewithal to spend the next up-to-a-year with you, reading your work, overseeing your research, and making sure you’re on the right track. Also, be absolutely certain you can stand this potential Advisor. If you can’t, you’re going to be really unhappy for the next up-to-a-year.

In any case, talk to your potential Thesis Advisor. Show him or her your proposal. Discuss what you’re going to do. Make sure the potential Advisor agrees with you on the researchability and testability of your topic (note that some programs do not require a topic to be testable, only that it is researchable). Get him or her to commit to working with you on your thesis.