How I overcame my fear of writing a thesis paper
It’s hard to imagine just four months ago I was struggling to get started on my thesis. Doing a thesis seemed like such a daunting task that I pushed it off until it was literally all there is left to do for my master’s program. Fear is a powerful thing. Here, the fear of writing a thesis made it possible for me to have it on my mind all the time and still make zero progress for over a year. Thinking back, I am shocked by how much this fear paralyzed me.
Having finished the thesis paper for a few months now, I decided to reflect and document my learning in the process. In this blog, I’ll talk through some key steps taken that allowed me to overcome my fear of writing a thesis paper.
Find out what makes me most uncomfortable
Address it like my entire thesis depends on it
Create a plan that takes into account my weakness, and stick to it
1. Find out what makes me most uncomfortable
When it was my last quarter at the program and I still couldn’t get started on my thesis, I couldn’t let it go on like that, so I broke the thesis project down into several high-level steps. They included picking a topic, getting data, cleaning data, analyzing data, model building, and writing the paper.
Then I tried to figure out which part I was most uncomfortable with, and it turned out to be picking a topic. As I reviewed my comfort level for each step of the project, I came to realize that once I have a general sense of direction, I usually execute well.
This led to the realization that I had little to worry about as long as I could choose a topic. At the time I was very focused on what still needed to be done, i.e. almost everything, but in reality, deciding on the topic would have removed at least half of my fear.
After this exercise, I could focus my energy on the identified weakness and start working on a topic, which brings me to the next step.
2. Address it like my entire thesis depends on it (which it kind of does)
I vaguely knew I wanted to do something related with investing, but investing is a general area with many potential research angles, and I didn’t know which to build my thesis around. However I did my research, I could not imagine that it would ‘wow’ people or contribute to the world in a meaningful way which I believed the thesis required.
That was what paralyzed me. I had this idea that a thesis needed to be grand and groundbreaking and that anything less wouldn’t be a thesis. Thankfully, my misconception was corrected by one of my thesis advisors through conversations that dug deep into my struggles, hesitance, and fear around the thesis.
This was huge, because I was convinced that I wasn’t competent enough to produce revolutionary research, which the thesis had to be based on—so much so that I thought I needed to finish a few books on investing and modeling before starting, basically setting prerequisites nobody ever gave me.
The discussions with my thesis advisor were key in revising my terribly distorted expectation and removing a significant barrier that prevented me from committing to a topic and getting started.
3. Create a plan that takes into account my weakness, and stick to it
Once I had my topic, I established a solid plan with milestones listed to make sure I kept working on towards the end goal. Some examples of milestones are finding and cleaning data, exploratory analysis, model building and writing the paper.
I then broke each milestone down into digestible tasks that I scheduled into my days and weeks. The purpose of doing this was to avoid feeling intimidated by a task and getting paralyzed by that fear again. Whenever I felt an urge to put off a task again, I broke it down even further. The idea was to make each task so small and doable that I felt silly not doing it.
Conclusion
It’s not unusual to get intimidated by what we’re unfamiliar with. I had never worked on such an extensive project or written a paper longer than 5 pages on my own before completing this thesis paper. I was intimidated by the size of the thesis project, not to mention its weight on the completion of my degree. At the core of my fear was the misconception of what a thesis was meant to be and consequently the struggle to commit to a thesis topic and get started.
I do wish I opened up about my fear and addressed it earlier on so I didn’t have to waste a miserable year putting my thesis on hold. However, as much as I wanted things to be different, I’d much rather spend time living than regretting. What’s important is that I finished my thesis paper and learned to overcome my fear in a constructive way.
