One of my advisors gave me some great thesis advice. She says that we should think of our entire fields of study as a fish. When we students start planning our theses, we typically want to add a new fin, a third eye, etc. What we really ought to do, she says, is come up with a way to add a single new scale on the fish’s body somewhere. *After* we’re done with the thesis, we can start worrying about how to get our scale to develop into an eye, fin, or whatever. The point of the thesis itself is just to describe the new scale, and prove to the rest of the fish-studying community that we understand the fish well enough to see where to put a new scale and how to fit it onto the ones that are already there.

This has less to do with academic purity, forests vs. trees, or anything like that- this is just for practical actually-finishing-one’s-thesis reasons. The key, I’m finding, to a workable thesis is to come up with a very small and focused question, and then mercilessly cut away anything that isn’t directly related to answering that question. At this point, the pile of stuff I’ve taken out of my dissertation outline is probably bigger than the pile of stuff I’ve left in there. It’s an incredibly liberating feeling, by the way- on the one hand, each secondary question or topic I get rid of means one less chapter of background to write; and, on the other hand, it means that I have a good start on a postdoctoral research plan (not that I’ll have the opportunity to pursue it, but still).