

A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life - stillsut
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-guide-to-thesis-writing-that-is-a-guide-to-life?intcid=mod-latest

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rhythmvs
> “There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the
> humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying
> themselves.”

Especially when they accept that the argument must exclusively be about a
discipline’s alleged usefulness to the economy. Last week the Belgian vice-
president said Latin should be replaced as a high school subject with
programming classes, because they are more useful. It’s been picked up, even
by prominent intellectuals:
[http://woutersoudan.be/20150405/](http://woutersoudan.be/20150405/)

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tormeh
Latin is pretty useless, though. Useless things better be more enjoyable than
their useful competitors and there are living languages to learn.

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cafard
I should say that it makes quite a few languages easier to learn: the Romance
languages and even the Germanic languages.

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tormeh
Yeah, but so does Italian.

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newaccountfool
"Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student
pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelor’s degree." Outstanding.

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wodenokoto
In Denmark all bachelor students have to write a bachelor thesis. It usually
counts as half a semesters work, and needs to be original research.

How else would you finish?

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bsilvereagle
In America, the trend has been towards industry sponsored 'Capstone Projects'.
A company comes in with a problem that may or may not need to be solved,
students are put into teams to 'simulate the real world' and are given a
semester or two to solve the problem for the client.

~~~
wodenokoto
I see that as fitting the same bill. You can't expect bachelor students to
produce publisheable quality work, but solving a problem (if it includes
gathering data and choosing theory to apply) is research within a very limited
scope.

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jackschultz
A couple things I got out of it:

> ...at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is
> called a “longread”

Very true with the and the advent of buzzfeed style lists.

> "[A theses is] about committing oneself to a task that seems big and
> impossible."

Kind of along the same lines as the short attention span comment above, but it
does seem tough to organize your thoughts and produce a non-trivial document.
Or in the case of a lot of people here, the seemingly big and impossible task
of starting a company.

