looming thesis and liberal arts rambling

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I'm literally one class away from graduating college, but have this darn 40-50 page thesis looming over my head. Sure, if the area of research I picked was more concrete (it's on sentence processing, which is so far from anything related to science at this point) and I had the mathematical savvy to create a model that made explicit predictions on it's own, I would be satisfied to some extent. My BS descriptive model (typical social science) can't really make any explicit predictions or really explain why people have trouble processing this certain sentence type, and I now have to write 40 pages of drivel related to this. I would gladly drop the summer thesis course at this point, but the professor and I worked really hard to get this experiment going, and I feel like I owe it to him to write this thing, regardless of how little use it will be to him (the guy is basically an artificial intelligence researcher, I don't even know why he let me study under him to begin with given how little I know about dynamical systems and computational linguistics).

Also, this thesis is not going to do me any good because I bombed the GRE so much so that I'd have raise my cumulative score by nearly 700 points to get into a decent graduate clinical psyc program. Putting the title of the thesis on a resume for an ambiguous office job would probably kill my chances of getting a job because it's so pretentious. I don't even know what the hell I was thinking when I thought it would be possible to get into a clinical psyc program with an IQ of 92 (this says something about undergraduate psychology/linguistics, haha; even people with statistically low intelligence can complete a degree in it with shining colors!). I feel like I've done a grave disservice to my parents by studying this area because they paid nearly $40k to get me an education that could be summed up nicely by Newsweek science article. The $40k was an investment towards getting into a good graduate program on a stipend, not getting some s**t office job that I never wanted anyways. I'd rather be a commercial fisherman, farmer, or taxi driver than spend my days shuffling paper for The Man.

I wasted 5 years of my life and have no job experience at all. I haven't learned a god damn thing (so much for the whole enlightenment business!) and am going to graduate magna cum laude. Should I be applying to retail jobs?

Basically, the moral of this thread is do not study psychology/linguistics unless you really want that office job, have strong business connections in your family, or are certain you can get the GRE scores necessary for a graduate program. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved learning about psychology, but most sane people do not pay nearly $40k for a super fun experience.

Sorry for being such a downer. I promise it won't happen again!

OK, Do not panic !

There might be hope for you, what you could do is to reconsider the way the thesis is written. Rather than trying to prove a point, you could prove a point by not proving a point.

My advice to you right now is to get a copy of the book by Alan Chalmers from the university library and read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_th ... ed_science

If you take a view similar to that of Karl Popper then you can consider the hypothesis that the predicitive model you have does somethign useful, then you can use falsification to test if it works. You might then be able to write a thesis based on negative results if you do this.

Karl Popper's falsification system has the key idea that no theory is right, but there are theories whcih have not been disproven yet.

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Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

I'm sorta in a similar situation. I finished my coursework in December, but had to take an incomplete on my thesis [Crazy now ex-girlfriend]. Fast-forward to now, and I'm still working on it. My GRE scores were pretty good and everyone said I would have no trouble getting into grad school, but I ended up getting rejected by all of them.

So now I'm stuck with an incomplete thesis in a subject that has very limited applicability, no diploma, and unemployment.

My degree is in Political Science, and I have no will to work on a campaign trail or anything remotely similar to that.

Kind of a poopy position to be in.

First, an IQ of 92 is fairly close to average, so you probably shouldn't let that stop you on its own. If your GRE score is that low, however, you may want to consider ways to raise it before applying to graduate programs. Depending on the program, your application may simply be culled from the pool of applicants based on that particular criterion.

Second, you have learned things at college. Most of them will not be particular to your field of study, but will relate more to work organization, time management, critical thinking, and written expression. Other skills have come as well (that whole enlightenment thing), but you will not necessarily recognize their value for a few more years. This is normal.

Third, I am not an expert in your field, but after studying social psychology for several years, I am virtually certain that your field cannot be creditably summed up in a brief Newsweek article. If your capacity to explain your field is limited to this extent, then it may be your own understanding of the field that is deficient.

Fourth, I would advise that your thesis depends heavily on the research questions you seek to address. Determine what questions you are interested in asking, and how your data may answer them. In quantitative analyses, you are most probably expecting to identify an association between two or more variables. Your hypothesis would therefore be that such a relationship exists. Mathematically, you are predicting that this relationship is other than 0. Alternatively, you may be predicting that the relationship is either direct or indirect (positive or negative). In either case, any statistical package (STATA, SPSS, SAS) will help you address the question and test for the statistical significance of any observed relationship. \

Fifth, once you have the research questions and hypotheses figured out, the rest of the paper writes itself. You introduce your topic and explain why the reader should be interested. You then provide an overview of past research relevant to your questions. You then explain how this research is relevant, what you expect to find in your analyses, and why. The next section describes the data and measures you are using to address your questions. After that, you describe the specific analyses you plan to run. Then, you describe the results of those analyses, and finish with a discussion of the relevance of those findings to your theoretical expectations, the field at large, and for future research efforts. If you take each of those sections of the paper, and treat them as separate chunks of information, it will become very easy to write 40 pages. If you write well, it might not even be drivel.