Whitman College Magazine Winter 2022

DIARY OF A THESIS
In 2020 and 2021, Emily Solomon ’21,
a psychology major, recounted her thesis
experience. With the guidance of professors,
collaboration with peers and the support
of classmates, step-by-step, word-by-word,
the thesis begins to form, becoming a
point of accomplishment and pride.
COURTESY OF EMILY SOLOMON ’21
What’s
next?
Let’s
do this!
AUGUST 2020
Hearing From the Experts
First day of thesis class! To start
8/26 things off, I met with the rest of the
senior psych students and the faculty. It was
different being on Zoom instead of all being
in person together, but I guess it’s something
I’ll get used to. The faculty members told us
about their areas of expertise and what kinds
of theses they can best help with. I’m not
too stressed out yet because I know I want
to do something related to emotions and
mental health, so after hearing the faculty
members speak, I have a better understanding
of what direction I can go from here.
SEPTEMBER 2020
Brainstorming and Bonding
9/7
I’ve been considering doing my thesis
individually because I want to learn
more about a trait called sensory processing
sensitivity (SPS), which seems too specific a
topic to do with a partner. But a few days ago,
my classmate Ava Randall asked if I wanted
to partner with her—and we decided to go
for it! We’re both interested in emotions and
mental health, and although I’m interested
in SPS, I think working with a partner will
be much better. And today, Ben Weitzel
asked to join our group, so now the three
of us will be working on a thesis together.
It’s taken a few weeks of nonstop
9/22 researching, but we’ve finally agreed
on our thesis topic. We’ve had to keep in mind
that we’ll be conducting our study online next
semester because of COVID-19, so we’ve been
on the lookout for study designs that we could
carry out online.
OCTOBER 2020
Research and Writing
It took us a while to dial in on what
10/2 exactly we want our area of research
to be, but now we can focus our search for
articles that are more applicable to our thesis.
I’ve learned that narrowing down a topic is
one of the most time-consuming parts of the
process, especially when working in a group of
three because we’re all trying to tie our specific
interests into one project.
At the beginning of the school year, we
all knew we were interested in researching
something related to mental health, and I knew
I wanted to research emotional intelligence
(EI). We then decided that mental health was
too broad so we ultimately agreed on anxiety
and depression, two of the most common
mental health conditions. Our research helped
us figure out that EI and depression are both
interesting to all of us!
NOVEMBER 2020
Trekking Along ...
Today we made a lot of progress
11/13 on the introductions section of
our thesis! That and the methods section are
due at the beginning of December, so we get
most of the writing out of the way before we
Research
topic?
Check.
Writing,
writing and more
writing!
WINTER 2022 / 29