Date: Sunday 9th March 2008
Title: The Honours Handbook For 2008
Another year is well on its way through the calendar and the university year has started as well. The University of Notre Dame opened its doors to the new and returning students for the first semester of 2008 the week before last and today had their usual Commencement Parade down High Street in Fremantle. This is probably the first parade Fremantle sees each year now.
It's not just the start of a new phase of life for a whole fraction of domestic and international first year students, it's also a less than wonderful return to the world of textbooks, early morning classes and exams and nowhere near enough time to do those wonderful necessary things like sleep late, play computer games or go out partying or clubbing for the rest of the student body.
The rest of the student body bar the handful that are doing postgraduate work, internships or are involved in Honours research - they are all going mad.
If you are one of this group for the last two or three months, you would have been going absolutely crazy as you tried to decide on a thesis topic, tried to narrow it down to a research question, tried to figure out how you would answer it and more importantly tried to organise supervision, enrolment and ethics paperwork. And jsut because you might have finished this part of the Honours year, does not mean it's one less thing to worry about.
A fellow Honours student confessed at the workshop this week: "I had to start again - my initial topic was not going to work. So I am now two weeks behind."
Over the next six months, you will get back aches from spending too long sitting down reading, writing, researching. You will get headaches from straining your eyes over fine print, computer screens and microfiche. You will become extremely stressed, your friends, flatmates, family and partners all wavering between genuine encouragement for you and genuine fright at how emotional you get. Some of them will resign themselves to the fact that they are not going to get any sleep till it's done simply because you will wake them up at all odd hours so you can tell them what you just discovered or you can belabour and brainstorm over a particularly difficult part of the project. And worst of all they will have to resign themselves to the fact that they will no dobut throughout all this, by mere association with you, be forced to learn something about a subject they have absolutely no interest in.
In fact, what you do decide to do for your research topic is likely to be something that you and only you are interested in. At a stretch your supervising professor might be somewhat interested or knowledgeable about some obscure microscopic detail of your project that they might use later in their own research but unfortunately this is all your own obsession. And obsession is putting it mildly. I was told by my supervisor and the dean of my college and that you need to be obsessed to do Honours - you need the obsession because it is often the only thing that keeps you going throughout the process - the only thing that makes you want to finish it. If you can say things about your association with the subject that err slightly on the normal side of possible loony bin certification, you are on the right track. Well with that in mind, I nominate a friend who is so obsessed with Thomas Peel and the politics surrounding his life in Western Australia that she is sure that his spirit hangs around her.
So you have to be prepared for the inevitable film of haziness that clouds of people's eyes when you start talking about what you are doing for your Honours. Even your fellow Honours students and coordinators will start to do this - in my case they already are. To them and most others, if they cannot follow it or understand it or just don't care, they are not likely to be interested and are very likely to label it as "boring" - nevermind the ramificattions it might have in the future for research in your field.
The other thing you must be ready for is the depreciation and deterioration of your social life. It suffers from the tertiary education system's version of "let's not disturb the honeymoon couple" syndrome. This is when as soon as you start a new romantic relationship of any sort and at any level of seriousness, your friends give you a wide berth because they assume that you won't have any time for them because you want to be with your newfound flame. And they do this without consulting you purely out of good but stupid intentions. The exact same thing happens with Honours: "But you'll be busy." said someone today. Well, one is never too busy to talk for a few minutes at the very least.
Then you have to deal with the detractors: "Why do you want to do Honours anyway?" or "Why are you wasting money on yet another year that you don't need?" You can't spend or waste any time trying to explain to these people that doing Honours is not decided on a needs basis necessarily - that you don't do it because you might need it or it might be helpful for a job or career later on. Trust me, these people are not the sort of people who'd understand. You do it because you want to, because the topic interests you or more likely because you walked into the supervisor's ever so carefully planned and sprung trap of "Oh, you spotted this - why don't you write a thesis about it?".
Honours year is a very good tool for weeding out the wheat from the chaff of your social circle. Those who don't understand and keep bugging you about not doing it, about graduating and so on are to be dropped immediately. These are people who have now clearly demonstrated that over the years you may have known them, they clearly know nothing whatsoever about what motivates or drives or interests you as a person. If they don't know it's because they don't care enough to bother.
The ones you should keep are the ones who patiently sit and listen as you alternatively expound your theories to the universe via them and then sob bitterly on your shoulder when Excel and SPSS refuse to do the nice pretty alogrithm calculations you desperately need them to do on your data. They are the ones who will keep replenshing the magic surfaces of your desk/lounge/coffee table/beside table with the god sent gifts of soft drinks/chocolate/chips/coffee/anything else likely to be considered a caffeine laced stimulant. The ones who deal with the bills with only gentle nudges to remind you that you really need to give them another hundred bucks for the power bill before the electricity is cut off and you lose that latest draft of your thesis you have worked so hard on. They are the ones who insist on you sleeping or getting out of the house into the fresh air on weekends.
And hopefully at the end of it all, come September when you hand the final draft in or October when the actual final "this is it" copy goes in, the final presentation is done and you can collapse and refuse to talk to anyone for weeks. Of course, this is when everyone insists that you celebrate and try to drag you out of bed (or wherever you collapsed).
And then that's when you have to wonder and find out for yourself, if it was really all worth it. I'll let you know in October.
- Marisa Wikramanayake
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