Student reflection on presenting and publishing a BA thesis
Femke Roos, who graduated from the B.A. International Studies in 2024, shares her experience presenting her thesis research at conferences and publishing it in an academic journal.
Like many others in International Studies, I started the programme being quite unsure of where I wanted to go with my career. However, after completing my thematic seminar, which dealt with how language can influence our perception of the world and events, I knew I wanted to continue with linguistics. Over the summer, I emailed back and forth with Dr. Hannah De Mulder, who taught the thematic seminar, and she suggested the thesis topic to me and ended up becoming my thesis supervisor. The thesis itself was on the use of generically intended masculine role nouns in Dutch (masculine terms like ‘actor’ being used to refer to people of any gender), which I tested by asking Dutch native speakers to name the first three celebrities they could come up with in different categories using either only the masculine form, or a more inclusive alternative. From the start of the research process, Hannah worked with me to ensure the research would be methodologically sound enough to present and/or publish, which meant I received very detailed and helpful feedback.
In spring this year, I was able to present at two conferences, one focused on sociolinguistics (Sociolinguistics Circle) and one specifically there for students and recent graduates to present their research on applied linguistics (Anéla-/VIOT Juniorendag). The preparation for this involved writing an abstract of what I would be presenting and creating a poster that captures the main ideas and findings of the study. While this initially seemed quite daunting, especially the presenting of my research to other conference attendees, the atmosphere at both conferences was very encouraging and I talked to various people working on either the same topic or a similar one. Mainly, people were interested in hearing about the research itself and share their own insights on it, leading to many interesting conversations and giving me new angles from which to look at the study.
The process of publishing the research was a bit more intense than that of presenting it, as it involved quite a lot of revising of the text itself. Starting from my BA thesis, Hannah and I went through several rounds of editing to make the manuscript fit the requirements of the journal we were submitting to (a large part of which was lowering the wordcount without losing important details). Not too long after submitting our manuscript, we received detailed feedback from two reviewers, which allowed us to further revise the manuscript, after which it got accepted. This process, from first submission to publication, took about seven months, though a lot of this time was spent waiting. Overall, it was really interesting to find out how academic publishing works. For those interested, the article is available here.
To any students who would also like to present or publish their thesis research, I would recommend asking your supervisor whether they would be happy to support you in this. While it is definitely not an easy process and will take you out of your comfort zone, it is absolutely possible, worth it, and a very fun experience.