We offer the following services exclusively for undergraduate students: honors and senior thesis writing and research; the research process; the internship process; PTK Honors in Action; PTK leadership development; international student services. Services are available by the hour, hourly packages, or flat-fee workshops.
Thesis Writing and Research Help: Topic Selection and Formulating a Research Question; Writing Process and Management; Search Terms and Databases; Academic Research and Sources; Annotated Bibliography; Literature Review; Institutional Review Board (Human Subject Research); Research Design Methods, Findings, and Discussion; Editing
Are you planning to conduct an independent research project or write a research paper honors or senior thesis but are unsure where to start? Our exclusive undergraduate coach Barbara Ebert is an expert in social science research, including principles, methods, practices/social theory, research methodology and styles, writing, and editing. We can coach you through the entire process or any stage of it, from helping you formulate a research question, locate and evaluate academic sources, write the literature review, delineate the methods section, analyze your research findings, draw conclusions, and edit the completed project. We also provide help for staying organized throughout the research and writing processes. As part of our thesis writing and research packages, you’ll have a private workspace on our client portal to store documents, contact your coach, and access the project manager to keep you on track! You will also have free access to our CompitaWiki knowledge base.
If you’ve found a broad topic or area that interests you, we’ll help you refine it into a manageable research question. You can also call on us to help with the methodology section, prepare some interview questions, or edit your citations. There are many components to a research project, so we won’t list them all, but here are some of the more challenging aspects we can execute.
Topic Selection
Finding and choosing a topic that excites you is the first step in writing a research project or thesis. We can help you choose a thesis topic that interests you and narrow it down sufficiently to be manageable. We’ll coach you by discovering your scholarly interests and focusing on a broad area/interest/general research topic. We can walk you through brainstorming, mind maps, and other techniques for generating a topic.
Formulating a Research Question
Formulating a research question out of the vague idea or question that motivates your research project can be a difficult task in the thesis writing and research process. We can help you transform your topic into an answerable research question that is measurable, timely, and relevant. We can support you in finding a puzzle piece inherent in the topic that may have been addressed by other scholars or has occasioned debate in the field. We’ll help you formulate/devise a research question that addresses a real-world problem, re-examines and provides a new answer to previous questions, or may bridge a gap in previous research and the academic literature.
Writing Process and Management
Writing is a process that takes patience, time, and practice – and sometimes a little bit of help and advice on writing, content, form, and style. We’ll help you generate a topic, create a thesis outline, and determine in which order to write the different elements. We also provide strategies for you to stay motivated and maintain momentum, stay organized throughout the process, note-taking, and keep track of sources and time management. As your coach, we’re your cheerleader throughout the process, from your first idea to completing your thesis!
Search Terms and Databases
Research at the undergraduate level can take many forms and topics, from climate policy to fast fashion. Depending on your research topic, your searches are equally wide-ranging and may include books, journal articles, interviews, government documents, social media, art, and many more. We can advise you on search strategies and techniques tailored to your topic and can help you identify and organize keywords from your research question into search terms and phrases, suggest the best electronic databases for your topic, show you how to use those databases efficiently, and where to locate other sources and collections.
Academic Research and Sources
When conducting thesis writing and research in the social sciences, humanities, arts, and natural sciences, the ability to identify, understand, and evaluate sources is essential. The nature and value of a source often depend on the topic and methodology of your research project. We can help you assess sources critically, including whether a source is academically credible, considered primary or secondary, is at an appropriate level of depth for your assignment, and is relevant to your specific research topic and question.
Annotated Bibliography
A typical starting point for thesis research is to compile an annotated bibliography that lists and describes the academic sources you’ve read on the topic. We can help you identify sources that reflect the range of viewpoints, approaches, and theories, including the current and seminal pieces relevant to your chosen topic. We can also help you with summaries and evaluations of the significant findings of each source that provide robust evidence supporting why the source was important to your research topic.
Literature Review
The literature review provides an opportunity for you to introduce the theoretical considerations relevant to your topic. It discusses previous and current research, the major theories and theorists, on your topic. We can help you appreciate the relationships among the significant variables and factors associated with your subject, identify possible gaps in the current research, situate your work in the larger theoretical literature, and draw connections between the source and your paper.
Institutional Review Board (Human Subject Research)
Suppose you plan to include original research with human subjects, including interviews and focus groups. In that case, you will most likely need to acquire ethics approval from the institutional review board (IRB) at your school. You cannot start your research until you have received approval or exemption from your thesis advisor and the review board, so you want to start early. We can help you start planning and writing your IRB application, which entails describing your research methods and identifying potential risks and benefits to participants in your study.
Research Design Methods, Findings, and Discussion
In what might be called the methods or methodology section of your thesis writing and research project, you need to articulate which and why you have chosen a particular procedure or technique to test your hypothesis/solve your puzzle/research question. What kind of method (e.g., survey, case study, content analysis) you choose depends in part on whether your assignment requires you to include original research (such as interviews or other data you collect yourself) or allows you to compile a synthesis of existing research on the topic and identify gaps or apply it to new cases. We can help you select among/from a wide array of methodologies employed in studies related to social science that best matches your research objectives and the requirements of your assignment/department. We can help you determine what kind of evidence you would (ideally) like to produce to evaluate it, how you want to collect or generate data, and how to analyze the evidence systematically and logically.
The results and discussion section(s) is often considered the most crucial part of your thesis – it is where you discuss the meaning, significance, and relevance of your research findings. There are many different ways of organizing this section. We can help you report the research findings objectively, without bias, and arrange them in a logical sequence. When discussing your interpretations, implications, limitations, and recommendations, we can help you be clear and concise, follow a logical stream of thought, and categorize your interpretations into themes.
Editing
From your first draft to final submission, we can ensure that your thesis is well-written and adheres to all style and formatting guidelines. We are experts in APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian style proofreading, editing, and formatting and can review your thesis for everything from general paper layout to word choice.
You can call on us to ensure that the style is appropriate for your writing project and discipline, meets the basic requirements and general guidelines, and is consistent throughout your paper (e.g., abbreviations, footnotes, quotations).
We’ll help with documentation of sources, quoting, paraphrasing, and proper use of citations, including properly acknowledging a source in a citation, seeking a good balance in your quotations, and cross-checking in-text citations with your reference list. Or, we can check for the organization of content, structure, clarity, grammar, and punctuation.