BEFORE YOU BEGIN:  Go shopping
Go shopping and buy:  (1) a journal -- not a spiral notebook, but a nice journal that will feel good to hold and open and read and write in, but which fits easily into your book bag;  (2) a pen -- not a Bic Stic pen, but a nice pen that flows when you write and feels good and solid in your hand.  And then if you can afford it, also invest in (3) a computer and printer -- Dell has good deals, or go to the Scholar's Workstation and get one of the special deals offered to UCB students; get a reliable system, especially a printer that will print out when you want it to, without smudges, squiggly lines, or those other annoying features of the inkjet printer you've been nursing along since your sophomore year of high school; (4) decent software -- a way of connecting to the internet; either Word Perfect (yeah team!) or MS Word in their office suite so you can easily paste in tables and graphs; and some sort of software for doing data analysis, preferably Stata or some other package.  Alternatively, open a socrates account with a faculty signature and you can use the analysis software available on socrates: Stata, SAS, SPSS and S-PLUS.

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STEP 1:  Identify your interests
What topics do you enjoy thinking about?  What sorts of economics news gets you excited?  The best way to find out what you are interested in is not by reading economics journals.  Instead, read the news.  Talk to friends.  Learn your family's history.  Think about economic puzzles in real life.  Then you'll be more likely to find a topic that can hold your interest for the next eight months.  Write down everything that occurs to you in your research journal with your fancy new pen.

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STEP 2: Write up several topic ideas
Begin narrowing in on a specific researchable topic.  Take two or three or four of the ideas that occurred to you when you were identifying your interests and, for each one, come up with answerable questions that emanate from the idea.  Sketch out some ideas as to why this is an interesting question and an interesting topic not just to you, but to "your readers" (i.e., your parents and your faculty advisor).  For each idea, write a one page (250 word) brief essay that sets out the topic idea, poses some answerable questions, and indicates why this would be an interesting topic to pursue.

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STEP 3:  Do some preliminary library research
Now is when you go to the library.  If you don't know how to make the library website work for you, go to one of their seminars and take notes.  Using EconLit, Social Sciences Citation Index, the current contents index of pathfinder, JSTOR, and any other index that strikes your fancy (but not google.com), search for published literature that relates, directly or indirectly, to your topic.  Look for books but mostly look for articles.  Download them, copy them, check them out.  Start reading, or skimming, them.  What have economists said on related questions in the past?  From what they've written, can you gain any insights into how better to approach your own topic?  How to formulate your own answerable questions?  Can you get some hints as to good data sets that can be used for your research?  Can you figure out what are the "classic" articles that you should be sure to read?

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STEP 4:  For one topic, write answerable questions
Use the information you've gained from writing and thinking and reading about your potential topics to sift through and decide on just one topic.  (Don't worry; you can always bail on this topic and start again from this step if in a few weeks you figure out that the topic you chose is untenable.)  For the one topic you've chosen, come up with a series of answerable questions.  Each question should be small, should have an answer, should be something you could answer.  For instance, "What caused the great depression?" is not small, does not have an answer, and is not something you can answer.  But "What happened to total retail sales in Berkeley, Palo Alto, and Oakland -- two towns with a university and one without -- between 1929 and 1937?" is small, has an answer, and is something you could answer.  Write every question you can think of in your journal.  Over time, you will sift through the questions and wind up answering just a handful of them.

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STEP 5:  Identify a data set
For topics with an empirical component, you'll need data.  For an undergrad thesis, most economics topics can be researched with publicly available data.  Start at FedStats and find out what data sets are available from the U.S. federal government.  Try Lexis-Nexis Statistical Universe.  Be sure to look at the published literature so you know what data sets economists who have asked similar questions have used.  Ask grad students or faculty in the field of your topic for advice on data.

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STEP 6:  Download the data; play with it
By now, you need to be sure you have a computer that will do what you want it to do.  Download the data.  You can store it on your hard drive, you can store it on your socrates account, or you can store it on webdisk.  Start playing with the data.  To do so, you'll need to have some software installed.  You can try to use Excel or Quattro Pro, but you will soon become frustrated.  Try Stata, TSP, SPSS, SAS, or some similar program instead.  Compute some means and standard deviations.  Compute means and s.d.'s for relevant sub-populations of your data.  Play with the data.  Find quirky things about it.  Find interesting puzzles in the data.  Lose track of time, print out lots of output, drive your roommates nuts with your excitement over things like t-statistics and p-values.

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STEP 7:  Do more reading; refine your questions
Now that you have started to play with your data and think about your topic, you can do more focused reading of the economics literature.  Go back to EconLit and JSTOR; use the Social Sciences Citation Index; browse relevant journals.  Take notes on what you read.  Write down the full citation of everything you read so that you won't have to go back and find it next April.  Use quote marks in your notes to indicate material that you have quoted word-for-word from a source so that you won't inadvertently plaigarize in your thesis.  Use what you read and what you are learning to refine your answerable questions.

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STEP 8:  Sketch out an economic model
Think like an economist.  What is the question that you are asking?  What are the factors that come into play?  What decision is being made at the margin?  What is the goal of the decision-maker?  Can you break the problem down into demand factors and supply factors?  Should you think about marginal cost and marginal benefit?  At this point, you don't need equations, but you do need to be thinking in abstract terms, sketching out at least with words something that your faculty advisor could recognize as the beginning stabs at a model.  Write it all down in your journal.

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STEP 9:  Do some preliminary analysis
Now that you've thought more carefully about the economics of your question, laid out the factors that are relevant to the question you are asking, it is time to go back to your data and do some analysis.  Can you run a simple regression that tries to get at the question?  Print out your results and keep them in some organized fashion somewhere.

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STEP 10:  Write a prospectus
A prospectus is a road map: what will you do for your thesis and how will you do it.  For an undergrad thesis, it should be a 5 to 8 page paper (double spaced, 1 inch margins on all sides, pages numbered, jagged right, with a title, the subtitle of "A Prospectus," and preferably a title page).  It should begin with a statement of the topic and the questions to be asked, placement of the topic into the broader economics literature, discussion of why this is an interesting topic (without ever using the phrase "This topic is interesting because . . ."), critical review of what others have written on related topics, description of what you will do, description of your data set, presentation of some preliminary analysis, and a concluding paragraph.  You should be able to use the prospectus in January to remind yourself of what you want to do, how, and why.

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STEP 11:  Ask a faculty member to advise you
Although the department will offer an Economics H195B seminar in Spring 2003 for all students who cannot find an individual advisor, our hope is that most thesis students will hook up with a faculty member who will individually advise your thesis.  The faculty member should be someone with an interest in your topic.  Look at the Economics Department webpage or the Econ H195A webpage for a list of faculty research interests.  The best way to ask someone to be your advisor is probably to introduce yourself with a brief (one screen, max) email, follow up with a visit to the faculty member's next office hour, have a brief conversation about your topic, and then ask the faculty member if she or he will serve as your thesis advisor during the spring term.  Faculty members often like to have something to read; don't be surprised or put off if the professor says "Give me your prospectus and I'll get back to you."  In this case, though, it is ok to send an email five to seven days later to (again) ask the faculty member if he will be your advisor.  Once someone says "yes," then you'll just need to tell Sandy Jaeger who your advisor will be and she'll get you set up with the Econ H195B paperwork for the Spring 2003 term.

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