So I had this vision of the overall SHAPE of my thesis, formed in part by books on grad school and by mandatory 100-level grad classes on Methodology and various theories, all helpful and well-intentioned.
Roaring out the gate after coursework, my starting point was, ideally, something like this:
After a year plus of compiling, branching out, note-taking and reading, this model dissolved into something quite different.
Later, I found that mapping individual chunks helped with understanding the different sections.
It has been this, mapping and moving, over and over, for the past 2 years now. Is it like this for everyone working on a grad thesis? Do others have an easier time of sorting through their articles, of keeping their sections clear and streamlined?
The distinctions betweens theories, methods and related ideas sort of got fuzzy – there were a lot of similar ideas, overlapping ideas, adjacent ideas, and I am still parsing through which are intended as my framework for analysis and which ones apply to my reasons for selected method. This is the work I am doing now, sorting and organizing and narrowing the different bubbles.
What I long for, to borrow from my favourite genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, is to get to a point where I can get the different sections correctly and clearly aligned, and to narrow them all down like:
and have a neat, little product, fit for submission at the end:
I would love to hear how others map and organize their notes and ideas over the course of their grad studies.
