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.

inspiration information

The final draft of my thesis is due on Tuesday. There's a few stylistic things to work on, but they won't take a very long time to fix. So I have been slowly re-introducing myself to Normal Human Society outside of thesis-writing. It's a little bit stressful. Where did all these people come from? and why are they so loud?

But, this is especially exciting because as of yesterday I am officially a grad student! (So, not really part of Normal Human Society.) I received my postgraduate handbook from Strathclyde yesterday. The highlight of this packet is the following:
"Research seminars: Invited speakers and members of the department present papers routinely. We expect you to attend on a regular basis. Even if the topic under discussion does not seem immediately relevant to your on topic, attendance is important. The ability to take part in debate and discussion on topics that may be unfamiliar is an important academic skill. If you wish to pursue an academic career, you will often find yourself teaching outside your area of research expertise."
Translated: You will attend other people's research seminars. It will make you look smart.

Someone told me I have six more days of classes left in my undergrad career. What? How?

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.

my thesis beard has been coming in nicely

this has been the best twenty-nine cents i have spent in a long time.

(to see a picture of me where i look exactly like my father, please click here).

I can't stop, that's why I'm hot

One of the side effects of thesis-writing is a sheer and utter disregard for things happening outside your little thesis cave... which is how i almost forgot about the commencement fair yesterday.

Incidentally, I had also forgotten that I'm graduating in a relatively short period of time. (Another side-effect of thesising is that you get so engrossed in your work you don't have time to worry about anything other than your thesis.) This is very convenient in that you don't have time to freak out about graduation or allow senoritis to kick in.

Though I am very sad I did not personally take this picture, I did stand next to this woman while waiting in line to get my cap and gown at the commencement fair. The Alumni Association really wanted us to go on a "Last Hurrah Lobster Bake". And by "wanted us to go" I really mean they had found middle-aged ladies to wear lobster hats and run around screaming excitedly about eating lobsters with your BEST FRIENDS FOREVER for the last time. Also it was $10. Obviously I am not attending.

And, despite my insistence that everyone should stop inviting me to everything ever, I consistently find myself alternating between linguisticking and Social Identity Awarenessing. I've decided I'm not attending anything unless I personally gain something from it. This vague "something" can be personal edification or food, saving me a food-journey. It turns out many social justice-oriented events also feature food, and my ideal event/linguisticking break involves both personal edification AND food, so if you are hoping to get me somewhere anytime soon, you should probably look into combining the two.

Which is how I found myself at the LGBTQ pancake breakfast this morning.. Despite my sheer dislike for Gay (adj.) + {Noun or Verb} to make a noun or verb phrase (Gay Marriage, Gay Lunch, Gay Parking My Car -- credit to Liz Feldman), I definitely attended Gay Breakfast today rather than sleeping. Free food > sleeping, and by waking up early/napping (far more realistically, this is what I've been doing) I have more time to work. Right?

For those of us keeping track at home, I have written eleven pages of my thesis from Saturday into Tuesday. This morning I've been editing my thesis as a whole, in preparation for Judgement Day With Shelly tomorrow, and I'm sort of amazed at what I've produced. In approximately three weeks I have not only restarted my thesis from word one, page one but synthesized four different theories into a working understanding of linguistic productivity, wrote a total of 17 pages out of my expected ~20 pages (one word and a period on page 17 totally counts) and have been loving every second of it. Despite my sometimes-vocal claims that this is exhausting and I can't wait for it to be over, I really do love this. Either I am delusional - probably from too much coffee, not enough sleep, or some combination of the two - or I have a very successful academic career ahead of me.

Dear my lunch (or maybe dinner, i'm not sure)

i might love you. Cheap beer and chinese food - how could you be wrong??

Dear take-out gods and/or Town of Durham, NH:
Thank you for finally having good chinese food within walking distance. you have improved my quality of life by at least 15%. Take-out gods: I offer my bank account as a sacrifice.
puppies, daisies and kittens,
heather


Judgement Day with Shelly went well today. After two weeks of reading, writing and thinking about a stack of academic texts and a week of mathing (yes my thesis is about math - enjoy the irony here), i am not only I on the right path but I'm exploring some really interesting things and have full permission to go forward with what I'm doing. Shortly after this announcement, Adam and G captured me and took me to a coffeeshop in Dover; it was like being a real person again for a little bit. Being a real person - rather than a thesis robot - is really, really nice sometimes.

Character Study: Dr. Lieber

Since Shelly keeps coming up as a Major Character in my life, I think it is time to define her for you, dear reader.

Dr. Lieber is kind of a big deal.

And when I say that, I mean it- She studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1970s and while there, developed the prevailing system of understanding underlying linguistic structure which basically says that the properties of each individual word item, both within the word itself and how the word functions in a sentence, are inherited by morphology (the study of word-parts, which is what I've been working on) and syntax (which is the organization of words into phrases which turn into sentences). In picture form, this structure looks like what is seen to the right: Any time a letter (N, P, V representing nouns, prepositions, verbs) is repeated that means it allows for phrasal attachement. This can be applied to word-parts in that you can separate little bits of words which make sense individually and allow for attachment and word-formation. If this makes your head hurt, imagine taking a class strictly devoted to things like that picture. Shelly teaches this class at UNH, and is notorious amongst the 35 or so Linguistics majors on campus for using all of her example sentences about Fenster and wombats.

(Which brings me to the next related thing to talk about - this picture, brought to us by someone in the UNH linguistics department in front of the English building. If you can't read it, it says "Fenster kissed the wombat" in IPA. This is a linguistics joke and a funny one at that - mostly because nobody knows we exist, nor will the rest of the English Department understand it!)

Shelly's work is mostly in morphology despite her important strides in syntax. She co-developed the prevailing formula to measure productivity of affixes through corpus study (in Not-Linguistics-Speak this means "what my thesis is centered around: The Formula.") This - among MANY other things related to word-formation and how it functions - is her main focus of research. She's been working on assorted projects of word-formation rules and how they are understood to speakers of language for a very long time.

She is very, very well respected in her field. So going in to see her today was an intimidating moment, as you have hopefully understood. I have weekly "homework assignments" for her related to Thesis 2.0; this past weeks' was to read three of her articles on word-formation and synthesize a methodology of measuring and understanding word-formation techniques in regards to her own research. But - for those of us keeping track at home, the work I brought into her was described as "on the correct path" (translated from Thesis Advisor-Speak that means "Yes, you're close. Now do this that and the other thing and it will be better. But yes, mostly.")

I AM DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!

The Cardinal Rules of Thesis Writing

seem to be as follows:

1. YOU ARE ALWAYS WRONG.
2. Can you do a b c e d f h i k l j m n o p q and r? i think it will make your argument stronger.
3. Don't try to do anything else ever. You didn't have anything else to do today, did you?
a. you can either sleep or eat. Choose one!
b. oh wait you had other classes, right? Can you still pass them without doing any work whatsoever?
c. unless you live with them, you will not see them. And even then it is unlikely.
d. HINT: if nobody is in the library it is probably a Thursday, Friday or Saturday.
4. this picture.

State of the Thesis 2.0

(yes, I have named my new thesis "Thesis 2.0". you love it.)



My weekend consisted of:
1 book called Productive Morphology
3 articles to embellish principles presented by the first book (including one which heavily featured "graphs", "math" and "logarithms", written by my thesis advisor)
(= one new thesis as of Saturday morning)
1 book about the philosophy of language and constructing meaning, Wittgenstien's The Blue and Brown Books and preliminary research on word-organization in the brain (thanks, friends) to further some ideas I have

plus a great many post-it notes, lots of coffee, not a lot of sleep and not eating very much = A PROTO-THESIS STATEMENT.

this is coming together nicely. let's hope it is deemed acceptable.