When Senior year strikes, reality just hits English Majors like a truck. If you are lucky, you will have less classes to take, and enough free time. You start think about grad school. The good part about that free time is that you will have enough to work on your thesis. Bad side: senioritis. For those who don't know about this deadly disease, it is dangerous. According to the Urban Dictionary, symptoms include laziness, lack of studying, excessive absences, and a dismissive numb-like attitude towards the stress that is the rest of the College Life. Senioritis by itself is not a problem. It is only when it gets attached to other entities that it starts to slowly kill us all. And what is the one thing that concerns Seniors? Thesis! English majors at St. Joseph's College have to finish their thesis by the end of the fall. So we start in the spring and continue in the summer. It becomes whimsically tragic. In this month of Halloween, there are five things that terrify English majors seniors at St. Joseph's College, when senioritis starts to attack thesis work.
1-Choosing a Topic: Chances are that you stop paying attention in class the minute Orientation Day ended of last year. Sometime in Junior Year you will have to choose a topic. When it's time to choose a topic, anxiety kicks in. You don't know what to pick out of the list of 20 something options that are laughing at your face. What do you do? You choose the one topic that you think you know about. Only to discover that you know (insert vulgar word here) about it. It gets worse.
2- First Thesis Meeting: Let me remind you that at this point you have lost some interest in your major. You will think of changing it. Which makes no sense because it would be too late to do that, but whatever. Thank you, senioritis. Which means that morning classes make you cringe. Guess what? If you are anything like me, your first English thesis meeting with the chair of your department will be in the morning at 9:00, after classes and Junior Year end. Oh, and did I mention that if you don't show up the head of the department can drop you out of thesis? Yeah, just drop you like a bad habit.
3-Annotated Bibliography: After you survive that first meeting, you are left with the nightmarish memory of an annotated bibliography due by email on a certain day. Sounds easy: taking a list of sources and explain how they are relevant to your work. Well, with thesis being more than 30 pages, it only makes sense (said sarcastically) for the Chair to ask for 100 sources. The annoying part? Out of those 100, you will only be required to use between 30-50 of them. The killing part? You doing that research until 3:00AM hoping that your heart and brain don't give up on your poor caffeinated-addicted soul.
3- Interviews: Sometime between the first meeting and the first interview, people may had been dropped out of thesis. Or they may have not; there's still hope. By this point you probably have a syllabus/contract-like paper given to you by Grochowski, or whatever the name of your chair department is. It dictates all of the things that were due on the day of the first interview! Did you read that? No, only lawyers do that. So when you got to that first interview you may have forgotten to have your in-progress-thesis outline. By the time the second interview comes and you hand in your updated annotated bibliography, you think you are done. The professor himself asks you to relax and just wait for the fall. Until Fall comes.
4- Autumn is Coming. The English Department Never Forgets: By the time Fall semester comes. All stress has stopped altogether. Or so you think. All that is left to do is write. English majors have to write between eight and ten pages every month. Sounds simple, does it not? Well, that's what Fall is for: to lure you into a false sense of security! The Chair and your Mentor won't be holding your hand at all times. Thesis works like an immature relationship: If you, the student, does not text first, The Mentor won't do it. And all of your thesis work goes south.
5- More Research! After submitting ten pages successfully the first month, you realize that some of your sources are not found electronically. You need to do the unimaginable. Yes, go to an actual library; that one place where the ancient ones used to stored their wisdom and request articles. Only to find out that some pieces of work are so fragile you can't take them home with you. If that happens, you will know that there's a different way to die: your body breaths, heart still beats but you won't be alive. Why? It requires you to do extra work and who wants that? You just keep writing with your mentor until you get a grade decent enough to graduate. Just hope for the best.
