Navigating Your Undergraduate or Masters Topic Choice
Embarking on an impactful research career, starting with your thesis
We’ve compiled this guide to share the tools and frameworks we think will be most helpful to you if you’re searching for a meaningful thesis topic.
About this guide
We recommend this guide if you are an undergraduate or master’s student. In the first part of this guide we will explore how your values could shape your research career, why ‘following your passion’ and specialising early might be misguided or incomplete advice, and how your thesis could help you explore and prepare for the paths you might take in the future. In the second half we will help you find inspiration for thesis topics, and introduce a framework to help you choose between options and narrow your options down to a specific research question. Finally, we will help you identify concrete next steps for your thesis journey.
How to use this guide
We recommend completing this guide over multiple sittings, e.g. working through one section per week. However, please adjust the pace to suit your circumstances. We think you will get most out of this guide if you start from the beginning, but you might want to skip some sections if you have thought about the content deeply already.
After reading the articles linked in each step, take some time to answer the prompts listed. We find that writing down thoughts on paper is a step that people often want to skip, but it can help tremendously in getting clarity for yourself.
Craft your own version of success
We believe that everyone should craft their own version of what success looks like to them. What matters to you? What would your ideal career look like? Research shows that popular advice like ‘follow your passion’ is often unhelpful, because passions can change and it can be hard to recognise them purely through introspection. We recommend you read this article to understand why systematic approaches to career decisions are probably more useful, and why helping others with your career will help you experience your job as more meaningful.
Reflect on your values and moral beliefs
Understanding your values and moral beliefs is an ongoing endeavour and you don’t need to have it figured out before choosing your topic. However, we do encourage reflection on this, as this might significantly shift your motivation to work on some problems over others and if this happens, the earlier you make this shift the better. What do we mean when we say doing good? Most people agree that they want to ‘do good’ with their lives. However, it is worth reflecting on what this actually means to you. We recommend reading the article linked above to learn more about impartiality, the moral circle and uncertainty. This will help you to get a better understanding of what sort of thesis topics would align with your values and what kind of problems you want to contribute to solving with your research.
Reflect on your values and moral beliefs
How much do you value animal lives vs human lives?
How important do you think is it to reduce existential risks for humanity?
How much do you value future generations? How do you feel about improving existing lives vs lives that exist in the future?
This flowchart from the Global Priorities Project can help you to navigate through this cause prioritisation process.
Here are two further resources that could help you with this reflection:
Take time to experiment
If you are reading this guide you are probably uncertain about what to focus on in your career and have not yet specialised strongly in any particular topic. It is also completely normal to not know what your main interest is or what you want to specialise in yet, if at all. This can be overwhelming in a time where we can literally choose from millions of options and have an incredible amount of freedom. When you are just starting out (as an undergraduate student especially), we think it might be best to focus on experimenting and ‘failing fast’ – taking opportunities for small experiments to see what is a good fit for you.
While being an undergraduate student, your past consists of little time and relatively few experiences in a narrow range of contexts, at least in relation to work experience. This means you are relatively ill-equipped to make long-term plans for your future. We think this is the perfect opportunity to take an experimental approach to your life – see your university holidays as a chance to conduct a series of mini experiments and wide ‘sampling’ of different experiences (also try non-research experiences) that will help you get a better understanding of yourself, what you like to do and what you are good at. What’s more, trying out different areas can help you to build an unusual combination of skills or knowledge which can give you a competitive advantage over someone who only focuses on one area. Do not be afraid to pivot away from something you initially thought would work out great for you, just acknowledge this as a disproved hypothesis and incorporate what you’ve learned into your best guess about what would be a great career for you. By doing this you can build a fulfilling career step by step, making active and informed decisions on the way, continually incorporating new knowledge and experiences about yourself on the way.
See this article for more info on how to test your fit for a research career. Research internships and other short term research positions are a great way to learn more about yourself.
Your thesis is a great way to experiment – keep reading to learn why.
You can use your thesis to
Learn more about a certain research area or topic
Learn new skills, including transferable skills such as asking (action-)relevant questions, building a theory of change or writing with exceptional reasoning transparency
Gain experience with a certain research methodology
Test your fit for research – feedback about your thesis might give you useful information about your strengths and weaknesses in research, how much you enjoy the experience and whether this could ultimately be a career you are interested in
Build career capital, e.g. publish a paper based on your thesis research
Build connections with collaborators, e.g. join a great lab, find an excellent supervisor (if you have the choice) – opportunity for seeking out good mentorship
Contribute meaningfully to an area of research, i.e. have a direct impact – building a Theory of Change helps with this
Reflection prompts
What beliefs inform your current level of confidence about whether you should pursue a research career? How can you test these beliefs? (e.g. producing research and getting feedback, write and submit a paper to a journal, take part in summer research fellowships/ internships)
Obtaining maximum information value – Which topics would provide you with valuable information about your strengths or which methodologies you enjoy using? What are uncertainties you have about the world and how can you go about eliminating those uncertainties?
What are your ‘motivated skills’? (i.e. those strengths that you most enjoy using and would like to use in the future)
Inspiration and ideation phase
Now it is time to get inspired! This article explains how research can change the world, and this is a comprehensive profile about a career in academic research. Next, have a look at our list of potential thesis topics to get inspired about a range of different particularly impactful research areas. See how different study disciplines can contribute to each of these topics with our example research questions that were recommended by our experts. We recommend you read the 3-5 profiles that interest you most in depth.
