If you’d asked me
a year ago why I was adding an Honours year to my degree, I would’ve said it
was to prolong – delay, even – the having to make a choice about what I wanted
to do, delay the having to ‘get a real job’ thing and all the stuff that
accompanies not being a student, like bank fees, and ridiculously priced
everything.
Initially I
didn’t want to do Honours (why would you voluntarily add another one to two
years onto your degree?) for the simple reason that it involved writing a
thesis of twelve to fifteen thousand words, something which scared me stupid.
(It was only once my supervisor told me to cut bits out that I realised I’d
written more than I thought I would, more than I had ever written before. Now, I
know I can at least write something in the vicinity of sixteen-thousand
two-hundred words all told, and I’m still not sure if it’s what I set out to
write.) After I’d actually figured out how the hell you actually ‘do’ Honours –
how to get the balance of researching, processing your research, writing ideas,
and meeting with your supervisor every three to four weeks right – I realised
that, as strange as it sounds, I actually liked the researching bit, the
finding of as much stuff as you possibly can and digesting it all, seeing what
comes out, what connections and ideas you can come up with, the hitherto
unnoticed patterns that may become apparent. If there’s one thing I know I am
going to miss about university, it’s the library and all the journals and
databases you’re given access to.
