Kind of a Nerd

So, should I end up going back to school once again in the future for a doctorate, I have come up with the title of my dissertation.

You're Not Special: How Parents, Schools and Society Have Emotionally, Intellectually, and Socially Stunted the Millenial Generation

The thing is, when I was first getting the notion that I may be going back to graduate school last spring, the prospect of writing a thesis daunted me. I always hated the idea of doing research, and just could not imagine myself being able to write something on the scale necessary for a master's thesis. And yet now I find myself eager to start working on it.

As I've written about before, my brain has been jump started since rejoining the college environment. For every paper I've written I've struggled to keep myself under page limits, rather than the fear I had of needing to stretch and reach for things. When page limits were more flexible, I found myself writing 8 pages for a 3-5 paged paper, and 18 pages for my 10-12 page final paper last semester in my theory class. If I can write an 18 page paper over a weekend without even conducting any research and only making minimal reference to established theories and literature, an entire semester to write a 30+ page thesis doesn't seem nearly as frightening as it did a year ago.

And what's more, I find that I clearly don't hate research as much as I thought I did. While clearly it would not be my first choice of weekend activities to pour over journal articles and write a research paper, I have nonetheless found a certain level of enjoyment from the process of writing such papers. When it all comes down to it, it's just like constructing an argument... something we all know I love to do. You have to seek out those whose views are similar to your own, find evidence to support your point, construct a logical framework through which to express your idea, respond to the likely criticisms and challenges to your position, and wrap it all up with a conclusion that removes any doubts of the persuasiveness of your reasoning. Sure you've got to do some actual research with numbers and figures that lend quantifiable support to your claims, but really that's just the necessary evil of the scientific method.

And then you just sit back and wait for the ignorant masses to condemn your ideas....