Successful PhD applicants: Did you write an honors undergraduate thesis?

[CaffeineSlug]

My question is addressed to successful PhD applicants who did not earn an M.A. in English and applied to Ph.D programs after undergrad. Did you write an undergraduate thesis? Suddenly panicking that I will never get accepted to PhD programs since I didn't write one. Will it not matter in the event of a kickass writing sample?

[ghijklmn]

I had the same worries, but I didn't write a thesis and ended up getting into plenty of programs! I'm sure having the experience might help, but I don't think not having done it hurts.

[hashslinger]

No, it won't matter. It's better to spend your time perfecting a really good 15- or 20-page paper than having labored through a long and meandering 80-page thesis. Not that the experience isn't worthwhile--I just sometimes think that it's more difficult to excerpt and abstract a long thesis than just work on a shorter writing sample.  

[jazzyd]

Yes, but none of the schools I applied to knew that while I was applying. I wrote my honors thesis second semester senior year.

[practical cat]

Yes. It helped me in two respects: 1. I happened to have a concrete 15-20 bit that I could cleanly extract and revise into a writing sample that I wouldn't have had without the thesis and 2. it taught me a lot about my own interests and about the process. It had little bearing on the actual application process, I'm sure.

[bdon19]

Nope -- if I had chosen to write an honors thesis, it wouldn't even have been done (and only barely started) by the time I was applying, so I decided to focus all my energies on the apps themselves.  It worked to my advantage having that extra time!