I spent the past year writing a sixty-page thesis

In all honesty, I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to write a thesis. Maybe I decided to do it because I like making my own life difficult. Maybe I like having something to complain about at all hours of the day. Maybe I just wanted to be able to say, “I have to work on my thesis” out loud, leaving friends and strangers alike dazzled by my dedication to long-form academic inquiry.

The one thing I do know is that exactly one year ago, I made the decision to take on this equally fulfilling and infuriating project after thinking to myself, “Yeah, I could probably do that.” Despite being told that law schools couldn’t care less about an English thesis, and there was little-to-no reason I should take on the unnecessary responsibility during my last year of college, I couldn’t be dissuaded. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about or how I would find the time, but for some reason I felt like I needed to do it.

By the time you’re reading this, I will have just turned in the final version of my sixty-page baby. I can only imagine that, as I hand it to my department coordinator, I’ll be beaming with maternal pride and might even shed a tear. But in all seriousness, though I’m in the final stretch, the 12 months I spent working on this thing have come with their fair share of highs and lows, as well as the occasional lesson.

The first thing I learned was that no one cares about your thesis. Not your mom or your best friend or the poor stranger who was just trying to hit on you at Midtown but is now backed into a corner while you rattle on about annotated bibliographies. Sometimes, it’s incredibly difficult to find the motivation to work on something that you know only three people, including yourself, will ever read. But you can also take refuge in that knowledge by convincing yourself you now join the ranks of other unrecognized geniuses, since no one can tell you otherwise.

Additionally, the knowledge you acquire through a year of conducting research on one topic will be so narrow and so deep that you’ll feel simultaneously brilliant and stupid. I often think about how the specialized knowledge I now posses must have pushed out some other, probably more important, information I learned in my childhood. I recently forgot how to spell “volcano,” but I also know all about Foucauldian poetics if that ever comes up in conversation, so I suppose it’s a trade-off.

This inevitably leads to your conversations with other thesis-writing undergraduates, which will largely focus on complaining about your thesis since you’ll both be incapable of actually getting into detail about what it is you’re actually writing them on. But in the end, that doesn’t even matter, since the mere fact that you’re going through similar experiences and have similarly inflated egos will automatically bring you closer together.

Finally, once you wade through the countless drafts, bouts of procrastination, last-minute deadlines, thesaurus searches and feelings of futility, you’ll read over what you’ve wrote and realize that you’re actually, truly proud. Then you’ll realize you’re graduating in three weeks and subsequently start on a whole new downward spiral (but that’s a topic for next week).

Just like any other college experience, writing a thesis is really about pushing yourself outside your comfort zone and seeing if you can rise to the occasion. Some days will be better than others, and you’ll question yourself at every point along the way. But in the end, it’ll serve as an ode to your four years spent dedicated to one academic pursuit, and that seems pretty meaningful to me.

Marisa Papenfuss is an overly nostalgic UF English senior. Her column appears on Tuesdays.