i am turning in my thesis today.

this is my thesis. it is 15 pages long. i wrote it in 6 weeks.

i guess I should start de-post-it-noting these library books then.

lately i have been thinking about academia

"Decide that you like college. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life."

-- Lorrie Moore

After this ridiculously crazy no-sleep, no-social-life, all-work thesis process I can't help but wonder why I have signed up for five to seven more years of masochism. And then I think about how rewarding of a process it is, but how truly frustrating it can be. It takes so much self control to not punch people in the face sometimes.

I think everyone should have to write a thesis / do some sort of equivalent senior capstone project in whatever discipline they choose to study -- way too many people float through college. Show me that you actually learned something while you were here rather than drank yourself to death every weekend. And take some goddamn pride in your work!


I am almost done with my thesis. I have a few minor things to tweak, but I'm very close.

Hey everybody, come check out how great I am!

My presentations yesterday went really well. (This is a blog about my thesis right? Guess what - you get to hear more about it!) Unfortunately, my project is not the most self-explanatory thing ever, so even though I had a sweet 32x40 semi-shiny sheet of paper, I usually had to walk people through it. This is fine unless more people show up halfway through my spiel, but I'm not complaining - a lot of my friends dropped by the poster presentation and a whole bunch of people came to my presentation to the English department. Thanks for checking out my work!

My parents The Scientists came up for the day, which provided almost unending entertainment. Some background: My dad is a PhD chemist and my mother is a biochemist who did some early work on the human genome project in Canada. These days they are writing manuals for scientific instruments, but the liberal arts are not their thing. Watching them try not to kill themselves during the four hours of the English Department Honors Conference was hilarious - the better a presentation was, the more they looked like they were going to put hot forks through their eyes. They are very intelligent people, but this is quite simply not what they do.

HIGHLIGHTS:
- Mom and Dad sitting next to Dennis Britton at the English department thesis reading, who is prone to flailing when he gets excited about things - especially the analysis of female and male sexuality in Spencer's The Faerie Queen
(to be honest, that was the longest amount of time I had ever seen Dennis sit still)
- Sarah Sherman, interim honors director for the English department, who was just so over this whole situation. "This is blah blah and they like this. their thesis is about this. sadly, there are still eight more presentation after this." (Not a direct quote, but close.)
- Mary Clark sitting behind me, having a grand time: "Hmmm. I don't think so. hmmm."
- the look on the English department's collective face when I introduced an equation to their lives. HILARIOUS. Luckily, we switched back to words quickly. (Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were celebrating the fact they finally understood something happening.)
- Mom and Dad finally meeting Shelly. Shelly and my mom could possibly be the same person - they have the same mannerisms.

Here is a very picture of me explaining my research to one of my many advisors (left) and my friend Kallie (right)

a time line

Presumably if you've been following my blog lately this post is a little bit unnecessary. But, whatever:


a month ago, I restarted my thesis from word one, page one.
three weeks ago, I started writing thesis 2.0
last week, I had a 17-page first draft
As of Monday afternoon, I sent my URC poster to print
As of yesterday morning, I had a URC poster
Tomorrow I'm presenting my research not once but twice!
and as of this weekend I will have a second draft.

even though the last few weeks have felt like this:

(you probably saw me wandering around campus looking like this)
I am pretty damn proud of myself for accomplishing so much in such a short period of time.

& a month from today i'll be graduating.
how does this happen!?

In my mind, the URC is like a very large-scale science fair. I hope someone brings a paper-mache volcano.

When I signed up for the Undergraduate Research Conference in March, I hadn't planned on having to restart my thesis. I also assumed that a poster presentation would be a fairly straightforward thing, which is why I decided to do a poster presentation AND a thesis reading. This may have been an error in judgment. But, there wasn't much I could do about it.

Last Thursday I very sleep-deprivingly drove to every nearby place that would print a 32x40 semi-gloss professional poster. Due to my tiny department of 35 students and three professors, I was in charge of my own poster. Conveniently, UNH offers these printing services, but they said they needed a 5-7 day turnaround time. This was the 5-7 day turnaround deadline before the URC, and I had nothing to give them. Worried, I went to Kinko's and Staples to get quotes. For the convenience of approximately a 2 hour turnaround time, I would pay nearly three times as much. I had planned on working on my poster the week I got back from spring break. I didn't even start rewriting until two weeks ago.

This weekend I started working on my poster. I sent it to print an hour ago.

To be honest, the nature of my project is that it is quite simply not accessible to everyone. There aren't a lot of pictures which are applicable to native and adopted locative prefixes. It requires a lot of very wordy explanation. There is no way to make this "user-friendly". I tried, believe me. It was a stretch to come up with two graphs.

Helpfully, the last time I used Powerpoint for ANYTHING was middle school, and we all had to make a metaslide that showed we knew how to use powerpoint. I had no idea how to make a poster using it... but there is no time for a learning curve. Luckily for me, someone compiled a How-To. Beverly, my old and rather crotchety computer, decided that this was a good time to let Powerpoint crash every 20 minutes or so. This was frustrating.

But, Shelly approved of my final poster draft while I was in class this afternoon. I ran to get it printed through UNH's copy center, which apparently is three days ahead of schedule and not costing me $92.25 for 32x40 inches of semi-shiny paper with things printed on it. So this is all going very well; much better than anticipated, really.

story of my life.

How many times have you said to yourself, "Oh good, I'm done working on that..." and then continued to stare at a screen of some sort?

PhD comics = academic truth. Sometimes I feel like a grad student already, albeit with infinitely less work.

lunch has been cancelled due to lack of hustle

So remember that time that I was getting freaked out by my thesis? Here's a story for you.

I had a meeting with my advisor today. The meeting pretty much went like this:

Shelly: There's no thesis, no coherency, and you haven't proven anything yet. You're not going to, if you continue on as you have been. These are merely notes on your corpora research. Consider them a reference from now on. You need to find this book, read it, and come back in a week with at least three pages written... and it needs to have an actual thesis.
Heather: Okay.
Shelly: When are you presenting? April sometime right?
Heather: April 23rd.
Shelly: That gives us a month. Good luck.

Essentially all the work I have done in the past six weeks is nullified. Which leaves me with absolutely nothing written and A MONTH TO DO IT ALL. So basically I am never eating or sleeping again.

(Conveniently, today I also got a job calling people around dinnertime to have them take surveys. I had submitted an application to the survey center a while ago. This would have been helpful about almost three months ago, when I wasn't doing anything of especial importance. I mean, I was, kind of, but I had the time to be flexible and work on a regular schedule... which is why I put in an application at the beginning of the semester; I certainly wasn't expecting to suddenly have to REWRITE 23 pages/6 weeks of work. Also today I had scheduled a census field worker test, hoping to have a summer job between undergrad and grad school. Go figure - of course today would be the one day I needed to read and essentially know an entire book.)

I think the correct phrase here is "take your balls out of your purse", which is exactly what I did: I ran off to the library, hoping they would have this book (thankfully they did) and IMMEDIATELY start reading it. I only recently finished reading and annotating tonight; tomorrow I'm assembling my thoughts and re-reading parts of it in hopes of being able to start writing on Saturday.

my thoughts today while reading
But this is okay. The way I'm looking at it, everyone has their Thesis Disaster story -- this is mine. It's totally fine. It just means that Beverly, my old and crotchety computer, will not blow up as she has been threatening to do; my hard drive won't erase itself; nobody in my family will die while I write my thesis. Right? Knock on wood, for sure.

remember: be here now

I don't think I do enough drugs to fully appropriate Ram Dass' 1971 book Remember: Be Here Now. (Nor do I think I will ever get there.) I'm also not especially interested in meditation or yoga. But lately I've been re-reading this book and remembering to calm down; even though I feel like I'm running out of time and things are going way too fast, it's going to be okay.

intra-research: some thoughts & questions

1. This is the one-year anniversary of my prefix research, sort of; to be honest I don't really remember when the due date for my research proposal was last year, but I recall it being in early March before spring break. (I want to say it was March 5th, but I'm alright with finding something in the middle of the month. I know that my proposal was accepted in early April.) Happy one year, prefixes! It's been fun.

2. speaking of which: HOW IS SPRING BREAK STARTING TOMORROW i'm so confused. I feel like I just careened directly into spring break. After spring break is April, and after April is May. And then my thesis is due, and then I graduate. When did time get faster?

3. Originally my spring break plans involved a presentation of my prefix research at the McGill International Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, but they decided they weren't interested in my cutting-edge research. Their loss... what I'm doing is exciting. So I guess I'm going home for a week. (The downside of living in a dorm is that I occasionally get kicked out of my living space for brief periods of time. It doesn't happen a lot, which is nice; though I really would prefer to stay here so I can keep working - I have a system, and it's been fairly effective. )

4. Who invented peach soda? and why does it not actually taste like peaches?

RE: Thesising

Today I start writing my senior thesis. Sitting next to me is my thesis proposal and a cup of coffee. Time to start working! I took my first personal day of my collegiate career on Tuesday in preparation for this.

I kind of feel like I'm faking it. Like, how did I get here? How is this actually happening now?

The future freaks me out, a lot.