In between classes, extracurriculars, and my Spanish and Portuguese thesis, I’ve spent the last year developing a new musical that runs Thursday May 11 through Sunday May 14 — Beautiful Girls: A Musical Playdate. Developed with two other theater certificate students, the play uses music by Stephen Sondheim to explore themes of friendship, queerness, and identity, and how all of these can and cannot be distilled in the clothes we wear. Looking back on this yearlong project, I realize it has helped me reconnect with what makes both research and creative work so fulfilling: the freedom to explore, improvise, and think beyond what has already been made.
The show runs only 45 minutes. Tickets are free, and may be reserved at: https://tickets.princeton.edu/Online/default.asp
When we started the project, we knew just a couple things about the show: 1) There would be only three actors: the three thesis students. 2) We would use songs by the versatile composer Stephen Sondheim. 3) We would queer this material by performing songs from a number of Sondheim’s shows, regardless of each character’s gender, personality, or “type.”
At our first production meeting, Vince, the music director, suggested it could be wildly fun to put our own mark on each song: adding voice parts to solos, layering different songs on top of each other, or even changing musical styles. This would require weekly sessions for musical improvisation. Rather than calling these “music rehearsals,” which implied some sort of set music to learn, we decided to call them “musical playdates.”
With the end of the semester and summer around the corner, it is hard to keep track of work when all you want to do is spend time outside. That said, there are still ways of staying on top of your daily tasks while keeping your plans to lounge in the grass. As opposed to giving tips on how to make your work sessions as efficient as possible, this week, I’d like to recommend a few apps to help manage your work.
This week, I’m finishing my thesis. It feels like a small miracle (or maybe a big one) to be putting the final touches on this project — the longest one I’ve ever started, let alone finished. But I should tell you that I sort of lied in the title of this post: there has been no tackling involved.
How I’d like to take on my thesis.
After many valiant efforts, the situation has come to remind me of childhood wrestling matches with my older brother. The harder I’d throw my tiny, indignant fists, the harder he’d laugh at me. Sometimes, I imagine my thesis doing the same. I sit down determined to blast out a full section, but instead find some trivial inconsistency in my figure formatting, and tumble into a coding wormhole trying to fix it. I reemerge hours later, much as my 6-year-old self did after every sibling tussle: frustrated, exhausted, and confused about how this has happened to me again. It feels like the hours have been stolen from me, along with my dreams of a completed Chapter 3. It’s easy to get lost in the project, which leaves me feeling like my hours of focused work are worthless.
Thesis to my tackling attempts: “nice try.”
Enter the Done List.
The McGraw Center teaches the “salami method” of to-do-list management: break each task into small, specific, salami-thin slices. Splitting items that may take many, many hours (“Write rough draft”) into those that take 30 minutes or less (“Write thesis statement,” “Fix axis on Figure 4”) makes progress seem more achievable.
This is great advice, but I’ve recently run into problems using the salami method on my thesis. One issue is that the number of slices I need is simply overwhelming. And then there’s the lunchmeat that flies in out of left field: new papers I come across, bugs in my code, figure formatting that ends up taking ages. Because I’m doing a lot of things for the first time, it’s hard to know how long it all will take – and easy to overlook tasks that end up being very time-consuming.
So, on a friend’s recommendation, I’ve started keeping a “Done List” – a catalogue of the things I’ve done, alongside the list of things I need to do. My Done List is the sworn enemy of data wormholes and literature vacuums. Instead of getting discouraged that I haven’t checked “finish discussion” off my to-do list yet, the Done List reminds me to recognize that I have downloaded three papers on phosphate limitation. One step towards understanding the literature. Check!
I now write a Done List and To-Do list in parallel, and I’ve found this approach useful for small and large projects alike. The two lists are important for different reasons: my to-do list keeps me looking ahead, while my Done List reminds me to appreciate my progress so far. Even when the steps are small, recognizing the “done” keeps me thinking positively, which helps motivate the next step, and the next. Maybe that’s not how to take down a world-class wrestler (or an older brother). But, fortunately, I don’t have to tackle anything; I just have to write a thesis. And I can do that, one little “done” at a time.
Last year, I was invited to be a judge for Princeton Research Day (PRD) as a veteran of the Mary W. George Freshman Research Conference. If there was one thing I loved about this conference, it was hearing my peers’ interesting research conclusions. I was excited to see this happen on an even larger scale at PRD, but I was also nervous; I felt that I had little authority to judge the work of upperclassmen (and graduate students!) with only a semester’s worth of experience under my belt. However, the event organizers were incredibly encouraging in this respect, valuing our nonspecialist input.
One of several poster presentations taking place at Frist!
Before PRD, the judges held a brief meeting to go over logistics and judging criteria. I felt that, rather than encouraging harsh criticism, the criteria really emphasized the purpose of PRD as a celebration and opportunity to share the hard work done by Princeton researchers. Scores were mostly based on how well people could relay information, translate their complex findings (no chart goes unexplained!), and engage an audience that has no experience in their field. This criteria eased a lot of my apprehension: I might not be able to judge the correctness of a data set, or rebut conclusions about culture in Georgian England, but I can judge how well these were communicated to me.
After you ask whether you should go to grad school, your grad school might have more questions for you (like this window at Harvard Kennedy School had for me).
After sharing some notes from my grad school visit, I’m back to discuss an important precursor to any such visit: The decision to apply to grad school. It seems that many Princeton students – myself included – did not come to campus with the expectation of pursuing an advanced degree. Yet somewhere between junior spring and senior fall, the question “Should I go to grad school?” starts lurking in everyone’s mind.
If you’re a rising senior, you may have already noticed this. If you’re a rising sophomore or junior, you can expect it to happen soon.
There’s no easy way to answer post-grad questions. However, if you’re considering grad school, there are three things you might want to keep in mind:
This spring break, I took my seventh Princeton sponsored trip abroad, with my classmates in ART 468: The Art and Politics of Maya Courts. After spending half a semester learning about the basics of Mayan architecture, society, and hieroglyphic decipherment, we packed our bags and traveled to Chiapas, Mexico to visit Mayan sites and modern descendent communities.
The trip was as an immersive experience where we learned about new aspects of Mayan epigraphic and archaeological work and unexpected aspects of topics we had already studied. We started our week in the quiet town of Palenque, looking at Mayan inscriptions on-site. Throughout the week, we visited other Mayan sites, ranging from the impressively excavated steps of Tonina to ruins that were barely visible under plant growth in the jungles and the countryside.
Standing in front of the excavated Mayan site of Palenque in Chiapas!
In class, I had read scholarly work about Mayan inscriptions and even decoded (and written!) my own. I found a unique sense of wonder, however, in being face-to-face with the stories Mayan hands had carved into stone hundreds of years ago. With the guidance of Professor Bryan Just, I was able to recognize common narratives about royal accession, court captives, and religious ceremonies in the stones.Continue reading Exploring Mayan Hieroglyphs in Chiapas, Mexico
In our spring series, Senior Theses: A Celebration, we take a moment in the interlude between thesis deadlines and graduation to appreciate the diverse, personal, and impactful work of seniors’ capstone research projects.
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Aubree Andres ’17 is an Anthropology concentrator with a certificate in visual arts. Here, she shares the story behind her visual arts thesis, an installation that transformed a room in the Lewis Center into a kaleidoscope of color and collage. The installation is titled after Aubree’s favorite non-word: &Thunk.
Aubree, a senior from Cambridge, Massachusetts, stands with one of the completed walls in her thesis exhibition. The panels are a collage of strips she cut from fashion magazines, interweaving images and words.
What is your thesis about? The intersection between chaos and control, the complications with human memory and fragmented narrative, and giving the viewer a lot to get lost in.
Tell me about the space where you created your thesis. I share a studio in Lewis with two other girls in the program. It’s facing Nassau Street, so we get tons of natural light. The heater’s broken, so it’s always really cold. But it’s just – it’s a mess, in the best way. The floors have been splattered with paint for years before you’ve been there. You know, each year, every studio is made to reflect the humans that are living and working there. It’s like moving into a dorm room, with the history of all the people who have lived there before you – except it’s a dorm room with no repercussions for throwing paint everywhere. You can tell it’s a space to get chaotic and messy.
What are the things you can’t thesis without? Mod Podge [a collaging glue]. Scissors. Lots of magazines. I mostly used fashion magazines – Vogue, and a bunch of old Oprah magazines from my mom. I spent hours and hours in the studio, often with friends, flipping through magazines…putting the show together was very different from the normal kind of stress I feel at Princeton. Oh, and I listened to a lot of music. Music is the real MVP.
What’s the soundtrack of your thesis? A lot of Hamilton, relaxing folky music, and long, random mixtapes. The three albums I listened to the most were Always this Late by Odesza, Malibu by Anderson Paak, and In Colour by Jamie xx.
“My mom is probably the most influential creative force in my life. She and I had done mosaics in the past – not on this scale or style – but I took a lot of my pieces home over winter break, and we laid down the papers and talked about it. That’s when a lot of the work started to come together.”
Did you have an Aha! moment in your artistic process? The weekend I installed the project, my parents had come down to help out, and it was an exhausting two days. My “Aha! moment” came just after I’d installed both of my bigger walls in the space, and then brought my beanbags in and sat down. My mom has a picture of me passed out there in a beanbag chair. When I woke up there, in that space, I realized: wow – I’ve done it. I’ve created something that I could look at forever.
“When I woke up there, in that space, I realized: wow – I’ve done it. I’ve created something that I could look at forever.”
What’s one thing you would do differently if you were to start again from the beginning? I was way too nervous at the beginning about what I was ultimately going to do. With a thesis and a whole installation it’s hard to see the endpoint from the very beginning, and I put way too much pressure on myself to perform – all with Mod Podge and paper, these most basic materials! I learned that not knowing where you’re going to end up is totally fine.
— Interview by Zoe Sims, Natural Sciences Correspondent
A good example of how I mark up my readings as I go
I often find that Princeton professors assume that we all know how to “read critically.” It’s a phrase often included in essay prompts, and a skill necessary to academic writing. Maybe we’re familiar with its definition: close examination of a text’s logic, arguments, style, and other content in order to better understand the author’s intent. Reading non-critically would be identifying a metaphor in a passage, whereas the critical reader would question why the author used that specific metaphor in the first place. Now that the terminology is clarified, what does critical reading look like in practice? I’ve put together a short guide on how I approach my readings to help demystify the process.
Put on your scholar hat. Critical reading starts before the first page. You should assume that the reading in front of you was the product of several choices made by the author, and that each of these choices is subject to analysis. This is a critical mindset, but importantly, not a negative one. Not taking a reading at face value doesn’t mean approaching the reading hoping to find everything that’s wrong, but rather what could be improved. Continue reading In Between the Lines: A Guide to Reading Critically
What’s the first thing you should do after your thesis is done?
More research, of course! The best kind of research. Fun research.
For me, that meant investigating the place where I’ll spend the next two years: Harvard Kennedy School. At HKS, I’ll study policy and political communications as a Master of Public Policy student. I’ll also develop leadership skills as a Sheila C. Johnson Leadership Fellow.
Fact: Signs like this exist for pictures like these.
I’m unbelievably excited about these things. I’m also eager to learn who my classmates are, where my classes will be, and what Boston is like. Thus, I figured it was time for some research — at HKS’ New Admit Day, which took place on April 7.
Here are some field notes from my journey there and back:
April has finally arrived, which means that the deadlines for theses and junior papers are quickly approaching (cue the dramatic music)! While teachers and advisers may be reminding you to pace yourselves and to still find time to relax, this post is for those who are grinding through their work and may even be (dare I say it) binge writing. Whether you fall into this category or not, brushing up on some effective work habits can be helpful in all parts of academic life. With that said, here are a few strategies that I have found make my writing sessions as efficient as possible:Continue reading Effective Study Habits for Independent Work
