How Do You Begin a Thesis? Part 01
With only one month barely gone, our current cohort of 5th year Master’s students have hit the ground running finding a thesis topic that will keep them occupied for the next 12 months. Over the next few weeks, SANNZ will be talking with a range of 5th year students from VUW, Unitec and UoA to ask them “How are you starting your thesis”?
Read on to find out how the students at Vic have been making air visible, reading about cross cultural urbanism has been boring, and how this first month, for some, is leading to an existential crisis.
SANNZ: How are you starting your thesis?
Ben Everitt: I began reading about my topic: Cross Cultural Urbanism, and representations of Japanese and New Zealand culture within urban spaces. Unsurprisingly that task became very boring, very quickly, so I switched to making composites of aerial images from different landscapes and cities. It was an exercise to quickly communicate the contrast in culture, landscape and urbanism between the two countries through images.
Tasenka Guilford: My thesis has begun through the methodology of design as research approach. So instead of conducting literature reviews or researching case studies I have literally been trying to “make air visible” through a series of installations. These have then been reflected upon to help the iterative progression.
Henry Dickson: I’ve started my thesis by just doing a lot of reading. This isn’t necessarily a process that I recommend because it means that a week or two before the first review I’ll suffer some kind existential crisis once I realize that I’ve got nothing to show. This will probably mean that I will have to revert back to applying misunderstood theories to some bits of cardboard that I stuck together. But on the other hand, to just let the reading take me to weird places while trying to figure out how any of it relates to architecture, has been really liberating. So I think I’ll just keep reading for a bit longer.
Tom Lock: By simply asking, who am I? What are my hobbies, passions, challenges and how can it help our community? By extracting what means most to me through a visual log, it has helped uncover what it is that I can do for the community. The following year will ask how architecture can help to promote positive mental well being for Wellington students.
Charlotte Hughes-Hallett: It begins with a problem. By digging into all the knowledge that had been acquired over the past four years there was a curious theme that I inherently always addressed but only at a face value. Now being granted 9 months to formulate a solution we have the opportunity to immerse ourselves into the complexity of a chosen problem/topic. But nothing was going to prepare me for the magnitude of existing knowledge. Thus, I have found it imperative in the primary stages of my thesis to position myself within the topic’s existing “body of knowledge”. Put simply, I’ve started my thesis with copious amounts of reading, writing and drawing.
