Post #8

I feel like I’m going through extreme fluctuations in my level of confidence concerning my thesis. At the beginning of the semester, I felt relatively confident in my ability to write a paper...after all, writing is what I love to do! Literature and communicating my thoughts on literature and other forms of writing are the bases for (what I hope will eventually be) my career. Then I underwent a steep drop in confidence when I realized just how much work all of this was going to be and when we read numerous articles on managing stress and how few jobs there really are out there. However, now that we have started to put together the individual parts of our prospectus, my confidence is slowly but surely returning. Knowing that I can work through my thesis in a similar, step-like manner slightly puts my mind to rest.

Although I know my introduction needs quite a bit more work before I will feel confident including it in my prospectus, the peer review session really instilled me with a little bit more confidence regarding this whole thesis deal. I used to balk at the idea of anyone other than the professor reading my writing. Peer review sessions in grad school have helped to alleviate that anxiety and have shown me that sometimes the more feedback you can receive from your qualified fellow students, the better equipped you are to fix problems whose solutions have been alluding you. Much of the criticism I received in our peer review session included aspects of my introduction that I knew I needed to work on but was not exactly sure how to fix. I knew my thesis was a confusing mess, but I wasn’t sure how to fix it. I’m horrible at knowing when and how to split my thesis into two parts; I am afraid my thesis will be unclear and difficult to locate if it cannot be found in one sentence. However, it was the aspect of my paper that people criticized the most. Since the thesis was difficult to understand, so many other aspects of my introduction were hurt. From the criticism I was given, I have been able to re-work my thesis (into two sentences), which I hope improves the quality of my introduction.