Thesis' finale

I’m in one of those I-love-my-life moods. Everything’s been going so well; my thesis, my marks; my social life. J’suis content.

Of all of my procrastinations over the past four years, my thesis ranks among the most stress inducing. I suppose that’s a fitting way for me to end my degree; leave the biggest thing the longest and then deal with it while juggling exams at the same time. Fitting because this is how I’ve most consistently operated at university. And somehow I end up pulling through. If doing this degree has taught me anything it’s how to cram, and how to do enormous amounts of work in incredibly small lengths of time. This is definitely a useful skill, though I really won’t be putting it to its best use until I couple it with doing things ahead of time as well. THEN I’ll be able to accomplish so much more, so much better. That’ll come. I think it’ll arrive when I attain some higher level of maturity in my work-ethic. Hopefully during law school.

A&P ended up going surprisingly well – it pays to have copies of old exams. That’s definitely a plus to being in fourth year, for me anyway. My social network has grown exponentially, where I’ve made the most new friends this year, and first year I only really made a few. And now that I know so many people, information about courses, and old tests, and tonnes of useful stuff that helps you do better academically is at my finger tips. Anyway, after A&P was through on that Saturday, I had one more exam, invertebrate zoology, on Tuesday, and then my defence on Wednesday. P set a deadline of Monday at 9am of having my whole thesis done, and turned into my committee. I was insanely productive that weekend, stayed up all night Sunday night, and emailed the whole thing that morning at 8:59am or something like that, might’ve even been 5 minutes late, but I wasn’t stressing. Through the night everything had just.. come together. It was partly the Intro that needed work, but mostly the Discussion. I’d been jotting down so many ideas, putting post-it notes on so many articles, scribbling outlines of how I wanted to get across particular ideas, re-arranging and re-writing bits from my proposal from the fall. That night it was all assembled. It was definitely not as polished as I’d wanted it to be – all the other sections had gone through multiple drafts and edits. The Discussion didn’t. But I had such a feeling of relief that morning! I finally had a completed thesis in my hands. No, it wasn’t the final draft, that wouldn’t be turned in till after the defence. But it was something substantial.

Cramming for invert wasn’t pleasant. There were a couple of major phyla I had to skim, but I was pretty solid on most of it. A 2h nap in the afternoon helped a bit. Got almost 7h of sleep. The exam on Tuesday went alright, not as bad as I’d feared anyway. That day I had to make the powerpoint presentation for the defence itself. Sara, the second of my supervisor’s three honours students, was so much better prepared than me. She’s very studious. Very much an ahead-of-time person. Anyway, I bumped into Shannon briefly on my way home from the lab that night- I haven’t really mentioned her lately, she was enormously stressed out. She had two theses to do, one of which was an extra course she took on in order to graduate with a particular degree. She procrastinates worse than I do, and that’s saying something. She had a bit of break down the moment I saw her, and then sort of recovered and told me all about where she is with the thesis and everything else that’s been stressing her out lately. I have a far less stressful life than she does. Her family’s insane. Anyway, after almost two hours of catch-up with Shannon, I went home, ate, and then stayed up till 4am ish doing the powerpoint. I have a thing with powerpoints where they have to be awesome. I have an artistic side that doesn’t get out much, and I love it when I get to do anything with design or whatever. So this powerpoint was damn good by 4am. My defence was at 11am. I slept till 8 or 8:30, arrived by 10:30, and delivered the presentation. I felt it was kind of shaky, like, flow-wise, but everyone said it was great, even P, my supervisor. I enjoy public speaking in general, and I think that being an ok speaker made up for the fact that I hadn’t really had time to practice the presentation. There were lots of questions, but they went well too. Immediately afterwards was the defence itself, where I go into a conference room with my committee and they grill me and see if I really know my stuff, and comment and suggest changes to the penultimate draft of the thesis. I was almost too over-tired to be nervous lol. I spoke a lot, I spoke my mind, I wasn’t afraid to semi-ramble when I was confident in what I was saying, because I knew that the defence is where they gage how much you know, and how well you understand and can actually defend the thesis. One of the committee was on speaker phone, which I didn’t mind. I have a good student-teacher relationship with each of my committee members. I’ve done well in classes with each of them, and I feel comfortable going up to any one of them and talking about biology stuff one on one. So that definitely contributed to a comfort level during the defence. Anyway, at the end, they put me out in the hall, had a short discussion, and then emerged to congratulate me on a job well done. I’d passed lol. That’s all you know at that point- you don’t get an actual mark till you make the suggested revisions, and then submit it.

So my exams were over the defence was, too. It was almost a weird, anti-climactic end to the whole thing. The revisions were supposed to be done by the following day, but my stress level was way down. That night there was a get together at a pub in town for honours students, like me, and faculty. It was really nice.

I ended up finishing the final draft of the thesis by Friday morning. P sent me an email back simply saying: “enjoy your weekend!” It only dawned on my gradually that the whole thing was over. *sigh* -still feels good :)