Week 14: Writing the First Two Chapters of Thesis Dissertation

This week I am spending a lot of my time writing the first two chapters of my thesis dissertation on the topic of vulnerability through understanding our perception of memory and the stigma of mental health within Asian cultures. Since the outline I created last week helped me so much in writing the first introductory chapter, I will be doing a similar thing for the second chapter of literature review. The way I will be writing this chapter is by creating sub chapters separating the four topic areas to make it clear and will end with a conclusion of the whole secondary research.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

• Introduction from John Locke’s “memory theory” leading to newer studies, discuss about the correlation between our memory, our moral behavior, and our identity

2.1 The Psychology of Our Memory

• The fact that memory is changeable which leads the possibility of false memories when attempting to recollect
• Moving on to the phenomenon of autobiographical memories and the tendency to overgeneralize
• Suppression of memory and its effects

2.2 Silent Mental Health Crisis in Asian Cultures

• Introduce the fact on underutilization of mental health services among Asian communities and the first reason being the element of oppression as immigrants
• Discuss the second reason being language as barrier, symbolic gestures are better for some cultures with the example of mother raising their children
• Legacy of mistrust and skepticism from white controlled institutions and contribution of religious beliefs

2.3 Healthy Ways to Regulate Emotions

• Explain emotional regulation and its relation to being vulnerable, also the benefits in the long run

(need to do further research on this topic over the winter break)

2.4 Effects of Environments towards Our Emotions

• Effects of both social and physical environments towards our well-being and others
• Discuss about the properties of built environments in relating to our senses

(need to do further research on this topic over the winter break)

Some Reflections on the Whole Pre-Thesis Semester

I have to say that this semester has been rough, especially coming into pre-thesis class without knowing what I would like to do. However the small exercises that we did in the beginning of the few weeks did help me in nailing down a topic that of my interest, even though the development of it was tricky all along. But now that I am halfway done with thesis, with myself being pretty much on schedule with the timeline that I have set, I feel so much better and definitely a little burnt out since I have not rested properly for the past two weeks of this semester. If someone asks me whether I am proud of where I stand right now, the answer will probably be maybe since I actually feel more of the intimidation of having to create a physical installation for my thesis project. I do want to do this and excited about it since I have never done such thing in this big of a scale before, but at the same time I am scared because I have no idea what I am doing and the process to achieve that goal.

In regards to the quality of the class, I thought it will be so much better if I could have received much more constructive feedbacks from different professors. I mean I appreciated the comments I got from some classmates, but honestly they are not enough. I feel like it would have been more helpful if during our mid-term and final presentations there are a few guests coming to watch our recorded presentations so that they can give fresh perspectives since they have no idea about our previous thinking process. I think this might have been the reason why sometimes I feel stuck during this semester. I have only been receiving comments from my primary advisors and nothing from the other two advisors. From my undergraduate degree, I was so used to the nature of critiques when my advisor and other guest critics are throwing a bunch of things at me to consider for the next steps. I hope next semester will be much better with the existence of secondary and tertiary advisors.

I was looking forward to this winter break, a time when I can finally rests from all the burnt out this semester has caused me. But apparently we still need to work on our thesis project. I mean was not planning on fully do nothing and just put my thesis on pause, I will definitely work a little bit on it, but I just did not expect the amount of work and tests that I have to produced over the winter break so that I won’t be too stressful next semester. I wish I know about this earlier so that I can plan my time better instead of packing everything to this winter break. Anyways, I will be working on creating more prototypes for the vulnerable space for one and hopefully have a more polished idea for the vulnerable space for two. I am hoping that this thesis project won’t me too much on the financial side.