The research process comes full circle — less than a year after finishing my Woodrow Wilson School task force as a junior writing a Junior Paper, I’m now serving as a Senior Commissioner for a task force about federal policy and poverty reduction in the United States. The job of the Senior Commissioner is to help lead class discussions, to assist juniors in the research process, and to collate everyone’s junior papers into a final briefing book at the end of the semester. Having been through the whole task force process before, it gives me a unique perspective to help guide juniors through their first steps into independent work.
At some point in your Princeton career, you will likely have to write a long paper replete with a table of contents and extensive bibliography, possibly containing complex mathematical equations, and/or multiple figures and tables. For many students, especially those in the social sciences or humanities, writing a research paper using word processing software like Microsoft Word will be the fastest and most intuitive method (especially with the help of automated citation tools). However, for other students, formatting all of these features using regular word processors will be inefficient, or worse, create unsatisfactory results.
Formatting the different parts of your paper should not be a precarious balancing act! LaTeX automatically formats and coordinates all of these features so that edits are seamlessly incorporated into the document.
For these types of projects, you may benefit from a typesetting system capable of consistent structural layout, superior typographical quality, support for scientific equations, internally referencing figures and tables, and automatically compiling large bibliographies. Enter: LaTeX.
LaTeX is a free open-source typesetting system that uses code and text to generate a PDF document. It allows you to explicitly define formatting options so that document structure remains consistent. Although the workflow is completely inefficient for writing short documents, when it comes to large and complex papers, LaTeX can make life a lot easier. For projects like Senior Theses, many departments at Princeton even have LaTeX templates with correct formatting built-in. While struggling to get a handle on LaTeX last year, I learned some useful strategies that will help you vault over the learning curve:
Although it still feels like summer, my fellow seniors and I know that thesis-season is officially in full swing. Some of us may still be finding a topic while others have started gathering sources, but no matter where you are in the process, it’s never too late to start exploring strategies to assist you with your independent work. The senior thesis is a year-long, taxing, and rewarding project, but it doesn’t need to be painstakingly stressful. After completing a junior paper last year and talking with several seniors about their own independent research, I’ve gathered several tips on how to make independent research more enjoyable. Here are a few essential items to what I like to call the thesis-prep kit:Continue reading Thesis Prep-Kit
I enrolled in GEO/WRI 201, Measuring Climate Change: Methods in Data Analysis & Scientific Writing, last Fall to challenge myself and learn how to integrate field work, scientific analysis, and writing. Although I already had cursory experience in these areas thanks to a Freshman Seminar on Biogeochemistry in the Everglades and a summer of assisting ecological fieldwork in Mozambique, I had never created and executed my own field project from start to finish. In my naiveté, I presumed that although the course would be difficult, I would conduct research that had a clear and established “finish-line”—and that I would reach it.
My project centered around quantifying changes in vegetation cover in Utah over the past twenty years using satellite imagery. The first couple months of the class were frustrating and I floundered across the deadlines. Most of the science courses I had taken offered a framework: a set of given questions with specific, correct answers. In real research, I found, you must create the questions—and they don’t necessarily have “correct” answers.
Successful research is based on convincing motive that builds off of key literature to contextualize and explain the broader importance of a specific research question.
The Author takes a GPS reading in Spanish Fork Utah. Unfortunately, the field work never even made it into the paper…
Despite my struggles, the project seemed to be coming along. Using images from multiple Landsat satellites, I created a beautiful figure showing a steep decline in vegetation tightly correlated with rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Genuine results linking changing climate to remotely sensed vegetation! I was thrilled.
However, after weeks of writing and data analysis, I discovered that the seemingly important trends I was writing about were–to put it bluntly–garbage. In a peer review session, another student in the class hypothesized that the apparent decline in vegetation might be simply an artifact of comparing imagery from different Landsat satellites. I scoffed–but I also started to worry.
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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Xuewei Ouyang, a senior from New Jersey
Xuewei Ouyang is a senior in the Computer Science Department. For her thesis, she combined her passion for dance and her knowledge of coding to create an app called, ChoreoSpot. Here’s what she had to say about her work:
What is your thesis about?
In short, my thesis is about creating an app that takes a rehearsal video and, within various frames of the video, spots errors on the dancers’ bodies in comparison to the choreographer’s.
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.
This semester, each PCUR will interview a Princeton alumnus from their home department about his/her experience writing a senior thesis. In Looking Back on Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives, the alumni reveal how conducting independent research at Princeton influenced them academically, professionally and personally. Here, Dylanshares his interview.
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When I learned that Shayla Reid ’15 was in New Jersey for her winter break, I jumped on the opportunity to interview her for this blog. She currently works as a Fellow through Princeton in Africa at Young 1ove, an organization in Gaborone, Botswana that implements health and education programming for youth. A Spanish and Portuguese concentrator at Princeton, she was one of the people who convinced me to major in the department. And now, as I began to write my own thesis, I was excited to get her insights.
Shayla, back left, shares a fun moment with coworkers from Young 1ove in Botswana
Shayla’s thesis — “Mulher como protagonista”: Women’s Experiences with Parto Humanizado in São Paulo, Brazil — dealt with childbirth in Brazil, particularly the country’s high C-section rate. Though surgical intervention is only necessary when complications arise, in Brazil nearly 60-70% of all births in public hospitals are C-sections, and upwards of 90% in private ones. Though she was interested in the cultural reasons behind the high C-section rates, she also sought more personal experiences. Thus, as a Princeton Brazil Global Fellow, she spent the summer of 2014 in São Paulo. Paired with an adviser at the local university, she began to visit women’s health groups, interviewing women to see how they navigated the health care system in order to achieve fulfilling childbirth experiences.
In middle school, I remember being told that the best way to write an essay is with an outline. We would receive five-paragraph-essay worksheets, complete with a thesis statement, sub-arguments, and important supporting information. It was direct, simple, and structured.
Remember these outlines? Things were so easy back then. And, yes, your teacher probably used Comic Sans!
In this post, I hope to advocate for a different sort of writing. Outlines are certainly helpful organizational tools. But as I delve into my thesis, I find myself taking a more free-form approach. As I have previously written, I am writing on the legacy of pioneer Brazilian art therapist Nise da Silveira. Based on two months of ethnographic research, my thesis is about how da Silveira’s image is evoked and utilized by people who continue similar work. I have lots of interesting ideas, but no single, unifying argument. While writing an outline might be useful down the road, right now it would impose a limiting structure on my thought process.
Instead, I have decided to do what my friend Lily calls “Frankensteining.” To her, writing an essay is like creating Frankenstein’s monster: you have to find all the parts before you can sew them together and create a body. Lily explains:
“I think you need to Frankenstein when you’re developing any kind of complex argument because you can’t know what you’re going to say until you start figuring it out and seeing how different insights fit together. It’s writing as a nonlinear process — you don’t brainstorm and then write. They happen at the same time.”
The more I do theater, the more I understand its parallels to academic research.
Recently, I attended a workshop with John Doyle, the renowned theater director and Princeton professor. He shared two details of how he begins a creative process. First, he reads the script only a few times before beginning rehearsals. Rather than getting mired in the script’s details, he likes to let ideas brew and leave space for his collaborators’ input. Second, he stresses the importance of entering rehearsals with unanswered questions — because if you already know the answers, your questions aren’t rich enough, and there’s little point in bringing people together.
Approaching my first thesis meeting, I’ve been thinking about this advice.
As I have written (both here and here), I spent this summer in Rio de Janeiro, researching the legacy of art-therapy pioneer Nise da Silveira. During that time, I conducted over 15 interviews, attended numerous workshops, and collected various books and documents. Recorded on audio files and scribbled in notebooks, these constitute — in a sense — my “script.” It is a body of research so juicy, varied, and detailed, that it tempts me to dive right in and begin working my way through problems.
Yet, as I prepare for my first meeting, the most helpful thing I can do is not read over all this material. Delving in right away, I would get lost in details before I have a sense of what interests me. For the moment, it is more valuable to step away from my “script” and reflect. To think critically about my two months in Brazil. To ponder what confused me and what seemed contradictory. To come up with questions that I cannot yet answer.
Snapshot from the Lewis Center’s production of Elektra in February 2016. I’m the possessed-Chorus-maid on the right!
This strategy has worked for me in theater. Last year, in Elektra, I acted in the two-person Greek Chorus. Following our first read-through, we developed some big questions about the Chorus: Who are we? Why are we here? What makes us otherworldly? What grounds us in the physical world?
These questions, for the most part, went unanswered. But asking them from the start gave us time to test out answers every day, playing with different kinds of movement, costume, intonation — and, of course, finding new details in the script.
King of Prussia’s Athleta features muscular mannequin legs!
It took only a second for the topic of mannequins to pique my interest. I happened to be browsing at an Athleta store when I noticed the waist-down plastic legs in the window sporting colorful leggings. At first, I thought nothing of the typical figurines. But when I paused and looked again, I noticed that the mannequins weren’t composed of the slender limbs one usually sees in stores, but rather of muscular thighs and toned calves. My first reaction was one of elation—there was finally a window display with shapely thighs! But then, following my moment of internal celebration, a research question popped into my head: Do differently-shaped mannequins influence how women feel about their bodies?
Upon looking into the matter, I discovered that there weren’t many articles relating to this topic. After searching several combinations of terms that included the word “mannequin,” I found only one article that pertained to mannequins in the fashion industry. The source turned out to be a good find, however, for it explained the history of mannequins and how their purpose evolved from being used to fit clothes to displaying the latest trends in store windows. But now I was stuck with an exhausted list of search terms and only one article on which to base my findings. My research had left me with yet another problem: How do I go about researching mannequins? More importantly, how do I go about researching any uncommon topic? With some time and patience, I was able to come up with these three strategies to locate new sources. Continue reading Finding Sources for Uncommon Topics…Like Mannequins
