Boy Possen: experiencing a thesis
 When I started my thesis I definitely was ready for it. Finally, no more courses, no more group work, but something all of your own. How much fun would that be!
First there is the task of choosing and defining a topic and finding a supervisor. For me this was no problem since I knew what I liked best: forest ecology. Writing a proposal offered me a chance to dive deep into the matter. No real constraints of time, like with group work. It was possible to follow up all the leads I wanted. Relevant or not. Defining the objectives and the research questions was perhaps the hardest part of writing the proposal. They have to be crystal clear and the definitions should leave no room for interpretation. Quite a challenge I have to say. Deriving the methods which will yield results that enable you to answer your questions is fun. It involves a lot of reading because it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel every time. Constructing the methods really gave me the idea that it was my research. My thing. When the proposal was finished a presentation should be given in which I presented my plans. In my case this yielded quite some valuable tips that enabled me to further improve my methods and by doing so, my results. |
Although selecting the sites for my fieldwork was quite hard and I had to change my questions several times to fit the sites I could find, the fieldwork was great. There were days that I only met animals in the forest. No people at all. I wasn’t aware that those things were still possible in the Netherlands. Although it was hard work (sometimes very wet), equipment refused to work as planned, sites were changed overnight by harvesters and grapple-loaders and other things considered to be “bad luck”, the fieldwork was the best experience I had in my thesis up to now. I really enjoyed doing it.
Currently I am almost finished with analyzing my data. This analysis wears me down. It is no fun at all. It is so theoretical and involves many days pondering over books dealing with statistics and sitting behind a computer long, long hours. But it is part of the game. There is no other way to make any sense of the data gathered and for scientific purposes this is very important. I cannot deny however that I learned a lot from analyzing my data. Bit by bit I started to get a feel for the statistical package and statistics in general. In the future that might come in very handy. Luckily my supervisor is better acquainted with statistics so he is a big help in the process.
When the analysis is finished and my results are distilled from the raw data the next step, which I expect to be fun, presents itself: writing a report, especially a good discussion accompanied by sound conclusions. I expect it to be fun because once again a lot of literature study will be needed. So once again I get to read interesting articles and once again I am able to follow up the leads I please.
In short: Until now my thesis has been a good experience. Agreed, there were some very deep downs, but hey, they make you stronger and represent quite large moments of learning! |