Communicating my thesis has felt like a game of telephone.
Every time I went to communicate my thesis all of my thoughts had to pass through what felt like a bunch of people playing a game of telephone. So many people that the words I spoke to people didn’t quite match up with all of my thoughts about my thesis and research. At the beginning of the year, there were many people playing the game so the initial message did not make it all to the last person, aka whoever I talking about my thesis with. However, as time has gone on and I’ve had more time to think about what I was communicating and how I was communicating the easier it became. Currently, it is like I am playing a game of telephone with only a few people so the final message is much closer to the original message I was trying to convey.
At the beginning of the thesis process, I wasn’t quite sure about what I wanted to research. When people asked me what I was going to write about I would tell them that I was going to write about trees and maybe politics. This answer wasn’t the most compelling and didn’t fully convey the intriguing and interesting ideas that I wanted to ask in my thesis. As time went on the specifics of my paper came to light. I figured out situated contexts that would be good case studies for questions I had in my head. At this point was when my communication with others was the hardest. I could see the connections between different ideas but wasn’t quite sure how to convey them yet and when I tried it ended with confused faces from both those I was trying to explain my thesis to and myself. It was hard to communicate my thoughts before I had an elevator pitch.
Throughout the whole thesis process, the hardest part for me was coming up with a complying framing and focus question that actually matched the work I was doing. Every iteration of these questions seemed off in one way or another. At the beginning like much of my work, the questions were too vague and not really interesting. Later the questions became more interesting but never quite lined up with the parts of my paper I was writing. After a few drafts of my thesis, these questions have become more concrete which has helped me communicate my ideas more efficiently. With this process coming to an end soon hopefully, I will soon get to a point where communicating my research is no longer as complicated as a game of telephone.