Monday was the first day of the new, and last, semester. My friend and me spending the night in the Flixbus, getting back from visiting a friend on exchange in Berlin, we arrived just 10 minutes late to our seminar: Still in time for the 15 minutes-walk-in period of UCG classes. After saying hi to everyone we had not seen in half a year, it was time to get serious and write a bachelor’s thesis.

This bachelor thesis had already started some time ago. After I got back from exchange, around January, it was time for me to seriously start looking into different subjects. While on exchange, I had spent no time thinking about my thesis, leaving the UCG responsibilities for when I got back home. Also, the subject I had come up with for last year’s thesis preproposal was not what I wanted anymore.

I did not really know the best way to come up with the right thesis subject. My main interests are history and journalism, and preferably I wanted to combine those. At the RUG website I looked into what different teachers were researching, and I looked back into my old courses’ material to see if there was something I could use. I also read a lot of newspapers, and that is how I eventually came up with the subject of media on anti-Semitism in France. What interests me about this is that there is not much coverage in newspapers on this subject, while, after some research, I found it is getting worse and an increasing number of Jews is leaving Europe.

Monday-morning I was happy to already have this idea, so I could use this in the assignment of the thesis seminar. Most of the stuff we discussed during the seminar seemed pretty straight forward – we have done so much alike this over the past 2.5 years that formulating a research question or coming up with sound arguments are not the biggest challenges anymore.

Even though the thesis is supposed to be your own responsibility, I am happy we have a couple thesis seminars in the upcoming weeks. Ever since I have heard people talking about their thesis, I got nervous about the subject, as it is such a big and important project. The assignment we did in this seminar – coming up with a possible conclusion to your research question – actually helped me figure out more details about the subject: it forces you to come up with a clearer idea.

The other part of starting your thesis is finding a supervisor. We could choose any teacher from the RUG or other universities to supervise us, which gives you a lot of freedom, but it takes time to find the right person. I went through the teacher’s databases of the RUG website, and eventually asked a teacher I had last year. For now, it is waiting for him to confirm he can work with me, and in the meantime figure out more details on what I want my thesis to be about.