Trabajo Final de Grado. ¿Dolor de Cabeza? [ESP 𝗅 ENG]

Final Degree Thesis: Headache?

Greetings dear readers of this Hive community, in this opportunity I want to share with you a reflection in relation to the difficulties that students face when starting their thesis.

All of us who have done university studies, in which the presentation of a thesis is required as a final work to obtain the corresponding degree, face the stress of how to do the thesis.

Usually, we are asked to do a research and we are required, first of all, the title of our research and the problem statement. And even though, in some cases, we have already taken a course on research methodology, we do not manage to grasp the essence of how to start the thesis.

Here in Venezuela we talk about the EBT syndrome, Everything But Thesis, which leads many students to postpone the completion of the thesis for months and even years. This shows how aversive the process of doing the thesis is.

One of the mistakes made by some teachers of research methodology is to confuse the research process with the expository process, transposing the order of development of both processes. For this reason, they require their students to hand in a written report from the beginning of the entire research process that has not yet begun.

The research process is dynamic, changing, it is a coming and going, while the exhibition process is linear and static. I would say that it represents a photograph of the research. So trying to take the picture before having the object to be photographed becomes impossible. The student does not know how to start and how to put into words that which is still blurred and diffuse.

Putting the research process in writing has different rules from the research process, and there are a series of specific steps on how the research should be presented.

For the student who is starting out in the world of scientific research, it is difficult to carry out these two processes in parallel, and, if the teacher is not a researcher, he/she will tend to lead the student to carry out the formal written process before doing the research. He is even induced to write the chapters and to carry out the research as such when all the methodological aspect has already been written. This ignores making the students see that the research process is a back and forth, a do and redo. The research process begins from the very moment when we ask ourselves questions about a particular phenomenon that catches our attention as an object of study. At this moment we only take notes of what we are observing, they are drafts, not finished elements.

If the teacher understands the differences between the two processes, investigative and expository, he/she will be able to guide his/her students in the fulfillment of this academic requirement, while encouraging them in the exciting world of scientific research. On the other hand, both the teacher and the students will be able to take advantage of changes in the initial line of research, if changes arise, in order to accommodate what the data are showing. An example of this was what happened with Pavlov when he studied the digestive process in dogs. Observing the salivation of these animals when food was brought to him, he was struck by the unusual segregation of gastric juices before feeding, he became interested in the reasons why this occurred, which led him to investigate the conditioning psychological processes. This gave a twist to his line of research.