Should I write an Honors Thesis? (PL4401)

Should I write an honors thesis, PL4401? How do I do it? Is it difficult?

These are questions many undergraduates find themselves asking, and are also questions I've been asked numerous times. Thus I hope this entry will help people to make a more informed decision. If you have any queries feel free to email me at atqhteo [at] gmail [dot] com.

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Let me start with a disclaimer. I am a Psychology major at NUS, so what I say may not be 100% accurate for other majors/schools. In addition, this post was written in 2014, so if you're reading this much later, some policies may have changed.

Most people, when they decide they want to write a thesis or are thinking about it, there are 2 broad reasons why they want to do so.

1) They want to pursue postgraduate studies, or have a keen interest on research / scientific inquiry about a particular topic(s), or you are aiming for First Class.
2) They prefer writing a thesis over taking 3 modules

If you fall into the first category, I suppose you wouldn't even be reading this blog post. So most people are in the 2nd category, and are deliberating whether it is really better to write a thesis than to take 3 modules.

I  will present what I believe to be the most common questions + main things you need to consider.


Which Professor should I approach? How do I approach him? When should I do so?

Which Professor? Ideally, you want to find a professor whose research interest is in line with what you want to do. You can find out what each professor does here. If you have no clear preference for a topic, try to pick someone you like (e.g. from a previous module, seems nice and good) as it's a year-long working relationship.

How? To approach the professor, send him an email expressing your interest in having him supervise your honors thesis, and try to give a few ideas which you have (your final idea should be further refined after discussion so don't worry if the initial idea is too broad, etc).
What happens next is he'll probably arrange a meetup with you to have a chat to decide if he/she wants to take you as his student, or perhaps he'll ask you to submit a 1 page writeup of what you want to do. It varies by professor!

When? As early as possible! Every cohort seems to get more kiasu than the previous one. I personally approached mine once in Y2S2, and once at the end of Y3S1 (when he accepted me). No harm approaching early, if it's too early the prof will tell you himself.
It's best you start early because the more popular (because they are good) profs will be snapped up really quickly.


Which is more heavy, writing a thesis or doing 3 modules?

Let's do a precise comparison.

Time. Let's first look at time which you can precisely pinpoint.
For 3 modules, 3 hour lectures over 13 weeks would equate to 117 hours.
For your thesis, you typically run one experiment (it really depends on subject matter - for instance, Health Psychology topics may involve going to hospitals to interview patients or something), and assuming about 180 participants, and the worst case scenario of 1 ppt at a time, that's about 90 hours (I ran about 10 participants at a time, so it was about 9 hours?)

Of course there are other time involvements such as in the assignments of modules, or the writing of the thesis, meeting with supervisors, but these are hard to give estimates to.

Readings. How much reading do you have to do?
For 3 modules, average level 4000 module has 2-6 readings per week. Let's take it as 4 average. So that's 12 readings x 13 weeks = 156 readings
For thesis, the bulk of your reading is done initially during idea generation I think, as you need to read each article thoroughly to get a good feel of where the field is at and what to do for your thesis. I read maybe 50 articles for this stage?
Later on as you write and bolster up your content, the reading can be a more 'surface' kind of reading where you browse abstracts and skim through the main discussion points, so it's not like a modules' readings where you have to read thoroughly. It's hard to give a ballpark figure, but my final thesis draft had 88 citations - this figure of course does not include articles which I have browsed but didn't use.

Which is heavier? You decide based on what I've said! (I personally feel that I did much less reading than I would have if I took 3 modules)


I still don't know. They seem equally heavy. What else affects whether I should I do a thesis?

A thesis is dependent on 2 further factors: the individual's working style, and the professor supervising.

Professor. I've had so many friends who got screwed over by their supervisors. There are a number of things you need to know about your professor (or try to find out) before embarking on a thesis under his/her supervision.
- Email turnaround rate: Some professors like have ridiculously fast turnarounds of 2 minutes - 30 minutes, even in the middle of the night. Others take 24 hours (still pretty good). The really bad ones can take anywhere from 3 days to a week to reply and email, and even when they do it's pretty vague.
Email turnaround is really important especially when you are panicking over one major problem and you need some professor-input, or when you're trying to arrange meetings, etc
- Working style: Is your professor hands on (i.e. willing to help you with queries you have) or hands off (i.e. prefers you to find out everything yourself and only helps you if really really necessary, and even then gives vague 'find out yourself' answers)? Ideally, he should be somewhere in between. You don't really want someone to spoonfeed you everything, yet you need someone who is willing to help when you need it.
- Extent of help: Some professors are willing to tutor you on how to utilize Medialab (Yes, I know a prof who actually did this), some will just thrust you a statistics textbook and ask you to figure it out yourself when you don't know the difference between logistic regression and hierarchical regression and which test statistic to report. If you have a particular weakness (e.g. stats), sound off early and see how your prof reacts - does he say he will help you if you really need help, or does he leave you to your own devices?
- Meetings: How often will you get to consult your professor? This is important in the initial stages when developing your thesis ideas, and especially important in the post-data collection stage when you are trying to make sense of your (most likely) weird results. Is your supervisor going on a conference anytime, and when? Will he be away on certain weeks? Try to find out these things early so you can plan your work.
- Drafts turnaround: How many drafts will your professor read? How long will it take for him to get back to you with comments? This is probably one of the most important things you need to establish AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE. The more drafts you have, the more likely you will get a better grade! (assuming you improve with each draft)

Your working style. As you can see from the above, a lot of your work is dependent on your prof's efficiency as well. Are you ok with having such an uncertain timeline?
When you take modules, everything is very structured in terms of when to read what, when is each assignment due, etc. When you write a thesis, it's up to you to plan your time and how fast you want to do things. If you are a huge procrastinator, modules may be the way to go for you.


To share my personal experience, I much prefer to work independently and plan my own time and work with my own deadlines (usually set very early). Thus, I made swift progress on my thesis and had my first draft out by end of the first semester. Now, 2 weeks before thesis deadline, I have already bounced 3 drafts off my supervisor, and I'm more or less done with it, while some other friends are still busy on their 2nd draft and nowhere near completion. Yes, I am very kiasu.

As for my own prof (Dr Eddie Tong), let me share based on the 5 factors above.
Email turnaround rate: He's pretty fast, usually within a day.
Working style: He's a mix. He leaves me to do my thing, but when I ask him for help he provides good help (provided they are good questions. He's particular about asking good questions)
Extent of help: He saved my ass with some statistics magic, by utilizing a different analysis procedure that obtained significant results. He also taught me how to run a logistic regression (provided syntax and all) and ran me through the theoretical underpinnings of it. Very grateful for this.
Meetings: No regular times, but in general when I ask for a meeting I would get it, it's just a matter of when during the week.
Drafts turnaround: Each draft took maybe a week at most to read - a really quick turnaround. We also agreed to about 3-4 drafts, as I asked him about this really early. Note that the drafting process can be quite brutal - I literally rewrote my entire 10+ pages of my introduction after my first draft.

Yes, I had the privilege of a pretty cooperative and helpful prof, which helped in making everything more efficient and allowing me to complete the thesis earlier. I think our working style kinda complemented each other - I was very kiasu and wanted to chiong everything fast, and he's very dedicated and will cater his time accordingly to help me churn out the work.

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To sum it up, you should do a thesis if
1) You manage to secure a professor whose areas of interest and working style align with yours
2) You are a good independent worker who can manage your time well
3) You would rather plan your own time than follow a plan
4) You would rather focus your reading on one main area and plan your own reading