Return to Richard's Grad Advice Page
As with all of my advice, this should be taken as supplementary to the official advice you can get from the University Dean of Graduate Studies web pages and our own School of Communication web pages for graduate students.
Your thesis is where you shine, but it isn't the END of your career, it is the beginning. So don't try to pack everything into it. Focus on an interesting problem, something that you really care about, do some research in which you can conceivably come up with results in a reasonable amount of time (less than a year, is a good bet for a PhD, a semester for an MA), and write it up clearly and concisely in a way that other people can read it. You are, after all, engaging in public scholarship at this level and your work will go into the library.