what's that, dissertation time?

Yesterday for our lecture, Hamid had a little surprise for us, he had invited a few of the 4th years to come along a give a talk for a little insight of what they are currently doing for their very own dissertations. They spoke of how they came up with their topic, how for some of them it just came to them in their sleep, and how they chose to do something that they find interesting, something they knew and felt they would enjoy doing. They told us of the research they did, how you should do all your research first before you start any writing and leave plenty of time to complete, go over and adjust any of the work before the hand in.

One of the girls that was speaking spoke of how she loves mythology and symbology, and how she is taking this into her work for her 4th year personal project. It was this comment she made about her passion for these two topics that made me realize what I am passionate about and made me think how can I take that into my chosen topic? How can I expand on this? What she said made me think of my one of my favourite Terry Pratchett books Going Postal where he talks about letters and words and how people look at them, how they interpret them, so looking at the relationship between people and words is something I am very interested in doing. I have also found an article online called 'The Crystal Goblet' which talks about how type should be, what it should be.

So now I have started looking for books and journals to help me with research for my topic and will soon speak to my seminar groups tutor to discuss their thoughts on it. I feel that yesterday was extremely helpful and think I would have taken a lot more time trying to come up with an idea if the 4th years did not come along to talk to us. I think that the dissertation will be more enjoyable than I thought now.