WHAT I REALLY LEARNT WHILE WRITING MY THESIS

Even though it is 'only' September, I am just one month away from handing in my Japanese Studies Honours thesis. It would be nice if I could say that just one part of this whole thesis-writing process has gone according to plan, but I think almost everything about this project has changed since I started it. Although I did make some interesting discoveries about Japan during my year (read: 6-7 months - the university year in Australia doesn't actually start until March and the project is due mid-October) of Honours, these discoveries were just one of the plethora of things I learnt while continuing my studies.  So instead of pretending that I spent the year buckling down for 8 hours every day and writing the best goddman thesis in the world, let me illuminate you as to what I *actually* did and learnt during my year of Honours: 

Almost no Japanese 

When you sign up to do an Honours thesis at La Trobe University, where I somewhat foolishly decided to do mine (but that's another story!), you have two options: translation thesis or analytical thesis. Prior to beginning the course, I already had a pretty developed idea of what I wanted to write about, and this topic happened to fall into the latter category. Looking back, part of me wishes I had chosen the former, simply because researching for an analytical thesis mainly involves reading a whole bunch of scholarship in your native language. Yes, I did read some Japanese this year, but I certainly did not receive any Japanese language lessons. Moreover, in the Australian higher education system there exists this massive gap between the end of your undergraduate degree and the beginning of a thesis. By the time you finish the third year of your undergraduate degree, assuming that your mother-tonuge is not a Chinese character based language, and supposing you have been extremely studious, you will know about 1,000 kanji. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds like an impressive amount. It is not. Japanese school children are required to know roughly 2,000 kanji when they graduate - the prerequisite amount for being a literate adult in Japan. On top of this, the type of articles you will be expected to read in Japanese to contribute to your thesis will likely use technical, academic language, and therefore may even have characters that are not included in the base 2,000. Luckily for me, I was born in a time when helpful language tools, such as the OCR software KanjiTomo, make it possible to understand unknown kanji with ease - but it is still a bitch, and the language is likely to be extremely challenging. Additionally, you don't really receive any further Japanese instruction so far as things like vocabulary and grammar go – it is kind of assumed at this point that you can handle yourself. Of course, your supervisor and lecturers are always there to help with specific sentences you don't understand, but that is not quite the same as continuing to hone your language skills through higher education. For me, this has been a real detriment to my confidence. I already suffer from horrible impostor syndrome when it comes to my Japanese, and being expected to jump into reading academic Japanese has done little to help. 

That you can basically kiss primary research goodbye

In Australia, if you want to conduct primary research for study you need something called 'ethics approval' which is a tedious, bureaucratic process which takes longer to obtain based on the complexity of the research that you want to do. Apparently 2-3 months is a fairly normal time-frame for gaining ethics approval. Put into the context of an Honours thesis which, as I stated earlier, you actually have only 7 months to complete, this is totally infeasible. Your timeline for work would be almost impossible – especially if the primary research you wanted to conduct was in another country.

The life story of my classmate: Danny

I have only two classmates who are completing Japanese Studies Honours alongside me, and I have become close friends with one of them. The amount of hours we spent talking about ourselves and our woes when we probably should have been working on our theses likely adds up to an impressive number.

How to read really quickly 

I'mma let you in on a little secret - almost nobody actually reads every word of everything they include in their reference list. Instead, the formula is usually - read the abstract, if that is promising, skip ahead to the discussion/results/analysis/conclusion. If the paper is *really* good I would read the whole thing, but the reality is that you just don't have the time to both achieve the quantity of references expected and read them all as thoroughly as you would like. Unfortunately for me, I am both a perfectionist and a bit of a completionist, so I *did* spend a lot of time trying to read entire articles. On the plus side my reading speed is now kind of insane. So I have that to show from my thesis. 

How to use Endnote

So this is one point that is actually really useful if you happen to be a student thinking of doing an Honours thesis. Endnote is a reference database program which works with Microsoft Word. Simply put, you enter the details of all your references into Endnote as individual entries and then, when writing, you can automatically input references with all the correct details for your required referencing style. While I found Endnote to be an extremely useful tool, it does have a few quirks you should be aware of. Like any database, the way in which you input information determines whether it outputs correctly. One I constantly forgot about was the formatting of institution names. If the author of something is an institute, for instance a government body, you MUST place two commas after the name to make it output as the name of a place. Otherwise, it will treat the name like a person's name - aka first name/last name. So your reference will output as something retarded like "Economist, The". Assuming that you proof all your references as you enter them though, Endnote is an incredibly useful, time-saving tool. 

What really goes on at an Academic Conference

One of the most interesting things to come out of my Honours year was the opportunity to volunteer at the Japan Studies Association of Australia's biennial conference. My role as volunteer was extremely varied - set up, tech support, registration, ushering - basically anything that needed doing to support the conference, I was there to do it. But what was really valuable about the experience was having the chance to meet a large number of prominent Japanese studies scholars, as well as some younger scholars who were trying to break into the field. What did I learn? Well firstly that the stereotype of all scholars being old people is more or less true. Although there were some young people presenting, the majority of scholars present were at least middle aged. I also learnt how specialised Japanese Studies is, and perhaps most importantly, that academia, like so many careers, is as much about who you know as what you know. I count myself very grateful for this opportunity for two main reasons. One, I was able to view a diversity of interesting and insightful presentations from leaders in the field of Japanese Studies, and two, I received a great insight into what working as an academic would actually involve – namely, teaching, researching, writing papers to present at conferences, travelling to conferences, and schmoozing. But the most valuable thing to come out of my experience volunteering at JSAA was my realisation of just how slowly knowledge flows from research to consumption in academia. As I’ll expand upon more in the next section, I've started properly using Twitter this year, and trying my best to keep up-to-date with the news as it happens. The contrast between the speed of information spread in academia versus the Internet is insane. When video-game announcements are happening at conferences in Japan, it will take only minutes for some information to sprout up all over the world online regarding the contents of the announcement. In academia, time is measured in years. I was already vaguely aware of this, but the it really hit home during the closing ceremony, when the scholar giving the speech signed off with the hope that some of the ideas to come out of this conference might be published sometimes “over the coming years”. Not just ‘year’, years. Call me a Gen-Y-er with ADHD, but YEARS is too long for me. This was one of the points at which I realised that I am far more interested in pursuing a career in journalism than academia.

All about Twitter, especially the 'amwriting' hashtag

It was during PAX Australia 2014 that it really hit me – if I want to be a journalist, I really need to be using Twitter. It hit me, and I tried, but I did not stick with it, because at that point I believed that I wanted to pursue a career in academia. As 2015 progressed, I was fortunate enough to find a job writing for Another Dungeon, and a few months after starting, I decided to try Twitter again, as it seemed to be THE place that news broke first. It is that and SO much more. I am not really sure how, but likely during a bought of healthy procrastination, I discovered the hashtag #amwriting. What is this and what does it mean? #amwriting is a kind of way for the writers of Twitter to come together, communicate and commiserate over how isolating an experience writing can be – it is a way to push through that isolation and connect with other writers. It is an awesome community, really providing a sense of solidarity with other writers, and I can’t recommend it enough if you are a writer of any description, but especially anyone involved in any type of longform writing.

That the Nutella-Chai Lattes at La Trobe are amazing

Nuff said. 

What this all boils down to is that writing a thesis *is* an experience-rich process, through which you are likely to learn much... just probably not the things you thought you would learn. You'll learn a lot about your own work ethic, and whether or not you are capable of doing an entirely self-motivated job - a great thing for anyone to know before they pursue a career.