Thesis Progress
May 12th, 2011 by PotatoI’ve blown through multiple thesis timelines now. My last one I printed off I thought I’d actually make: submit my thesis on Friday the 13th of May (a nice, ominous day to submit), defend sometime in late June, spend July and August as a post-doc in my current lab while I went job hunting for September (convenient as many academic jobs line up with the academic terms). But here it is dawning on the 12th and despite my most recent string of all-nighters and a location change, I’m still not done this round of revisions — and there are still more to come after this. Forget June, I’ll be lucky to finish by July at this rate. My dad says to relax, a few more weeks/months isn’t going to hurt, and I need to take a vacation. I do need to take a vacation (that was the plan for after I submitted). And as much as I wanted to be done by June, July isn’t that much worse… but I just can’t keep slipping behind.
So the rest of the world is wide awake now and I’m still not in bed. Overall, not a particularly productive day in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense (vs. the last few weeks), quite productive indeed, even if it did end with a rousing game of chase-the-kitty. Which was hilarious because she ran like 5 steps into the bathroom then realized her mistake, trying to scramble out of there. I could totally see her going “Ahh! Not in there, it’s all dead ends and bathtubs!”
Anyway, I can’t believe how much work there was still to do on this thing. I thought when I finished the draft at the beginning of April I was in the home stretch and it would be all downhill from there.
May 12th, 2011 at 2:03 pm
For my master’s thesis, I don’t think any of the text from my first draft survived into the final product. I’d say first draft was a little under halfway done for me.
May 15th, 2011 at 4:16 am
Yeah, but I’m more of a one-and-done writer. Most of my posts here are just hammered out and posted, with very minimal revisions (sometimes, I don’t even read them over at all before posting!). For my MSc thesis, about 90% of my draft ended up resembling the final product. Even with these revisions I’m struggling with, that’s still about the same. Just some minor things (like adding a new figure) take forever (esp. having to go back and dig up old data to display it in a new way). Plus about a third of it’s already been published so there really won’t be many changes there…