What I learned from Writing Thesis

Aef Setiawan
6 min readMar 14, 2020

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Finally, now I graduate with a Bachelor of Literature title in the back of my name after six months focusing on writing my thesis. Like most other students, writing a thesis is the most challenging period in academics life. Especially for them who has a low ability and never practice in academics writing.

However, I finally did. During six month of writing, I learned and reflected many things about my future career, and the style of my works. And here are some lesson learned that I got during working on my thesis.

I learned how to focus

I forsake my activities in the cooperative movement and my startup when I write my thesis. Holding two or three events will make friction with each other. I can’t run my startup well if I remember my thesis. I can’t write well if some task from my startup come up.

So, I decided to finish my thesis. I need to focus to finished what I started six years ago. From here, I learned that focus is not only how you execute a single task at a single time, but more from that. By focus on something, I can save more my energy.

Writing thesis taught me a lot about what focus is. The definition is simple; only commit a single task in time. Than writing thesis is one of the most demanding focus. If you once writing a thesis in your undergraduate study, you know what I mean.

I learned what perseverance means

I used to confuse between being result-oriented or process-oriented. I have time to practice its both. And here is the story where I practising result-oriented and process-oriented.

When I’m a result-driven person, I always worry about the result. I fear if I get a failure or something happens under expectation. Hence, it consumes much of emotion. In short, being a result-driven means my life is in the future.

But, often I wouldn’t say I like the process. My mind always tends to find the shortcut to get the result. I always get the instant and passed the process.

Whereas when focusing on the process, I’m not worried about the result. I live from time to time today. It helps me save my energy and my emotion more stable.

But, I often excuse myself if I have a mistake in the task. procrastinating the task and by saying to myself, process over result enjoy it. Or even despise the result.

And now I get the formula for my self: I only focused on something that I can control. Here the process is under my control. While the result is not. So, I learned to become a person that has discipline on the process but not despise the result.

When I write my thesis, I set the target. Then I break it down on the to-do list. Then, every day I checked what should I do and do it one by one. And I make time to reviewing the progress and result.

I learned scientific mindset

When I’ve been writing my thesis, I read some methodological books and learn how to think scientific as well. The concept of science is simple, you try doubt something then my a hypothesis. Then you come up with some to-do list to prove it.

Sound simple? Of course, yes. We can replicate it in our daily lives. Sometimes our minds create a bunch of assumption. If we don’t have a scientific mindset, it leads to overthinking. Do you know what overthinking is? You have too many assumptions in your minds.

By adoption scientific mindset, you doubting all your assumption and planning to prove it in the field. Your assumption is a hypothesis, and your jobs are just showing it right or wrong.

In my point, a scholar is not people with full of theory but less in action. A scholar is a people who based their work on a particular approach.

Dealing with boredom

Writing thesis, or other scientific writing, force you to have attention on details. Checking grammatical errors, logical, punctuation, detecting wordy sentence and proper word. Those are consume your time, energy and focus. And yes, this is not easy and make you fall in boredom.

But, here is the key point I used to confuse between being result-oriented or process-oriented. , I have time to practice its both. And here is the story where I practising result-oriented and process-oriented.

When I’m a result-driven person, I always worry about the result. I fear if I get a failure or something happens under expectation. Hence, it consumes much of emotion. In short, being a result-driven means my life is in the future.

But, often I wouldn’t say I like the process. My mind always tends to find the shortcut to get the result. I get the instant on writing thesis, or scientific writing force you to have attention on details.

Checking grammatical errors, logical, punctuation, detecting wordy sentence and proper word. Those consume your time, energy and focus. And yes, this is not easy and make you fall in boredom.

But, here is the critical point about the meaning of productivity: How I deal with boredom. Boredom and attention to details are sucks, and everyone tries to avoid it, including me. I often say I’m not passionate in these think when I face something difficult or boredom. But, since I write my thesis, I do believe that.

Passion is a myth. Most of the people identify working in a passion means you are always happy to do even though you tired. But this concept is such abstract, and you want to do something as long as you feel so glad. Then try to avoid or neglect the details in your jobs.

Meanwhile, I do believe every job has details and it might make you feel bored and unmotivated. Rather than rely on your passion, you should deal with boredom .

about the meaning of productivity: How I deals with boredom. Boredom and attention to details is sucks and everyone try to avoid it, include me. I often saying I’m not passionate in these think when I face something difficult or boredom. But, since I writing my thesis I do believe that..

Passion is a myth. Most of people identify working in a passion means your are always happy to do even though you are tired. But this concept is such abract and you just want do something as long as you feel happy. Then try to avoid or neglecting the details in your jobs.

Meanwhile, I do believe every job has their own details or something that make you feel bored and unmotivated. Rather than relly on your passion, I think you should to deal with boredom in regular basis.

Iearned why underestimate will kil you

Before I started writing my thesis in August 2019, I guess finishing the rest of my thesis in just two months of writing. Writing a dissertation is easy for me, only compile the data, analyze it and drop it to my lecture desk.

However, I forgot that I should write in English, not in Indonesia.
English writing is a beginner for moe. I rare writing English even for status in social media. Then what happened next was I sink down on my thesis for almost five months with my biggest obstacles were very basic; writing ability. However, the lesson learned that I got was every knowledge are based on flight hours and don’t to underestimate everything.

During my writing, I replace my goals in writing proper research with opportunity learning academics deliberately with advisors. Yes, I talked to my self to improving and honing my English skill both in speaking and writing. Here I’m such a beginner, but with deliberate practice, I can write English better and excellence one day.

#Ability over knowledge

You can start as a professor if you read the same book, living in the same social system and so on. Or your knowledge might exceed your lectures if you read more books than they read in a semester. However, this is just knowledge. Having experience or even producing knowledge is just stretching your mind.

Having particular knowing how to build the business it does not represent his ability in creating a million-dollar company. Because knowledge and expertise play in a different situation even though they can’t separate each other.

Ability requires repetition. The more you repeat, the strong your expertise in the building making something. If you want to have the knowledge of making business, just started your own company. If you wish to the right in writing your thesis, start writing like know.

There is no limitation in knowledge, it can be so advance. You might know what happens in the next 30 years, but your ability is shown who you are. If writing English is the first time for you, like me, you are really mediocre right now. Don’t plan to finish writing your thesis in two or in one month if you never string up any English sentences before.

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