A Road to Thesis

Time flies. And we're now heading to the almost end of semester 3. It indicates a lot of things:

1. We will be no longer having togetherness at class, a thing which I think I will absolutely miss a lot! 

2. No more lecturing, which means no more deadlines of assignments from the so-called wonderful vacation.

3. Getting closer to the graduation day, yeay!

To reach point 3 is not as easy as it sounds. How closer we get to the day, all depends on us, the vacationers. Our lecturers keep motivating and urging us to accomplish the thesis. The sooner the better. We are supposed to decide our very own deadline, because thesis is beyond the other assignments. It is gonna be the final one! We determine the level of the priority, in which list we put the thesis among our activities.

Alhamdulillah I have done 2 steps of A Road to Thesis. Step 1 was accomplished together with my fellows vacationers, a colloquium of the proposal abstract soon after we had two conferences: MICELT and iCLS in Malaysia and ELTeaM 2nd in Pontianak. Step 2 has been completed on Friday, December 19, 2014. I had my seminar for my proposal: A Study of How Students Utilized Weblogs in Developing Writing Skill.

Having had the seminar of my research proposal, I feel like to share some tips which I think will help us when writing the proposal, also the thesis.

1. Make sure the topic we choose for the proposal is the topic that we really understand what it's all about. For this point, no one can help us but we ourselves. Read, and read, and read a lot is the only key to gain this one. 

2. You got number 1 done? Great! Mastering it means that we love it too. Wise people say: do the things you love, and if you can't, then love the things you do. My experience was, I selected "Weblog" as the topic of the proposal since the beginning of the semester simply because I love blogging. 

3. Uniqueness of your study. Yes, do state this point in the proposal. Write it in the introduction part. 

4. Rename all of your journal articles files in your laptop folder with the title or if it is possible, with the author's name of the article. Also do the same to the ebook. Put them in one special folder so it will be easier for us to find them we we need them. It often happens that after we download an article from a journal, we name the file randomly. Better for us to name it with the full title of the journal article, so when we need to show it to the verification team of our thesis later, we will find it easily.

In the seminar, one of my supervisors said that I must put the page whether my quotation is direct or indirect. I use EndNote Program for doing the bibliography in my research proposal. It does help me a lot. So when I came back to revise the proposal, I only need to search the keyword from the books or journal articles I quote by using the name of the authors in EndNote, finding the files in the folder, and looking at the page I quoted.

4. Highlight the sentences we quote since the beginning we plan to quote the sentences. This point is related to number 3. Doing this will help us before the thesis examination when the thesis verification team in the faculty request us to show the part of the books or articles we quote. If we quote it from hard copy, also do the highlight, plus make sure to fold the page of which the sentences we quote.

5. Prepare your best. As Benjamin Franklin said, by failing to prepare you are preparing to fail. Getting closer to the seminar day, you will experience the days of hustle and bustle. Avoid your mind from being overloaded by preparing all the stuffs, even the little tiny stuff like snack preparation thing and so on. If it is impossible to do things by yourselves, request your friends to help. 

6. Do not hesitate to ask. Should there be any difficulties, confusion, unclear information, just ask people you may get the answers from. Holding too much prestige will not help us deal with many things hehehe ^.^v

Okay, for this very moment, I think those 6 points are okay. I welcome you to share your experience along writing the proposal so others may get the benefits from your experience too :D

All right, then. Let's keep on writing. Even if it is necessary, do what Christina Katz said: "Write and write and write until the words just flow and you no longer think about what you are doing because you lose self-consciousness". 

See you at Exam Room!