Here are some feelings at the start of the thesis process. The discussion was held together with Emilia and Kamil. We are all writing our thesis in the spring to have the last autumn of our studies more stress-free. In the past, we’ve all managed quite well with our essays, both in staying on schedule while writing them and keeping the quality high. Probably for this reason it seems that no one of us is stressing too much about the writing itself. Overall the biggest worries, based on the conversation, seemed to be the schedules of a huge work project. Also, we are all still at the beginning of the process – it is still easy to keep a happy face when the deadlines seem to be far away.

Kamil is writing his thesis together with Sanni. The exact topic and question are still open, but slowly getting together. Plan to create a project to go alongside the thesis. The topic of the thesis will be something around “how to develop a value-creation process for a company” focusing most likely on sustainability in education. At the moment thesis plan is still very vague, need to specify and narrow it down to not make it too big. Will try to do a huge mind map to understand the wholeness of the thesis. Perhaps on a classic whiteboard. The customer of the thesis and other customer entities related to the topic are strongly involved in the process. The goal of the thesis is also to develop a product(s) and new work possibilities for Mulperi.

Emilia will be writing about ageing women’s fashion. How to stay stylish throughout life and what are the wildest dreams of ‘fixing’ the current challenges in ageing women’s fashion? The customer for the thesis is someone Emilia looks up to, so writing and working together is interesting and motivating. Writing jumpstarted last week by collecting different sources together, so things are still at the beginning. Finding both free and original sources for the topic is very time-consuming, but she’s slowly starting to get hang of it. A strict timeline gives good pressure on the work paste. 

The topic of my thesis is also set and clear, the title will be something around “Demola Project’s Effectiveness on Employment Readiness, Based on ‘Good Guy’ Qualities”. I’ve started the writing process by creating a table of contents – straight to the thesis template, no need to double work later on. This one page provides an overview of the upcoming things that need to be done. This means that the different pieces -headings with subheadings- just need to be written. The hard part of keeping myself motivated has begun. Grinding the body text is not bringing similar pleasure and excitement as innovating the topic and content was providing. Hopefully, similar motivation spikes are provided in the data collection and the analysis of it – in these situations, there should be again moments of more freedom to pounder around with different ideas of how to proceed and structure things together. Currently, it seems to be a blessing that the thesis is being done for a paying customer. If and when the writing itself is not motivating, my need to please the customer should be strong enough to maintain the pace of work.

If interested to read more about the thesis process in Proakatemia, Essay Bank provides a lot of possibilities for it. Unfortunately, most of it is only in Finnish… But here is a link to one of the rare exceptions: My journey in Ultrace and how I’m going to do my thesis by Veikko Airas

This essay was created in one of Flip’s paja. Ella gave us a task to write a one-point essay in 60 minutes. How did I do?