I finally made it to graduation last Friday. There were times when I didn’t think it was a possibility, particularly when I was struggling with full time work, course work and trying to fit some research in as well. Even when the course work was done, the research dragged on. The amount of work I managed to do on it depended largely on how busy my job was at the time. Motivation levels were often very low as well, as I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic. And, of course, when my house was burgled and my laptop stolen, I lost an entire chapter worth of data that I didn’t have backed up anywhere else.

I perservered, though, pushed on largely by Cheryl who tried her best to keep me motivated. When it came to writing my thesis, Andrew took pity on me and arranged a monitor, keyboard and desk so that I didn’t have to spend hours hunched over the laptop at the kitchen table. For months on end I got up at 5 am so I could work on the thesis before work, and would come home from work and continue on it until 10 pm or so. I resented the thesis for taking up all my spare time. And when it came to formatting, I hated it with a passion. There is one unforgetable Sunday, after spending days trying to format the thesis, that I opened the document just to find things were back to how they had started before formatting and I screamed and screamed at the computer and cried my heart out. I just didn’t know what else to try to get the document how I wanted it and not how Word apparently thought it should be.

January 31 2007 I submitted my thesis for examination. On June 1st I got the results of the examination, which were better than I had expected. Just minor corrections to the satisfaction of the Head of School. It took me 3 months to get those changes made. I had only just found out I was pregnant when the results came in, and I was so exhausted all the time that there was no way I could drag myself out of bed at 5 am, and absolutely no more chance that I could keep my eyes open after work. Consequently it took me 3 months to get the changes done, took another 2 months for Nick (my main supervisor) to approve the changes, and when I worked out what I had to submit to the Head of School, he ended up approving it very quickly.

So, from submission to graduation it was 10.5 months, and from enrollment to graduation it was some 5 years and 8 months. I’m just glad that I never have to look at that thesis ever again!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under Thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.