Results tagged “Thesis” from V2

The big public display might have been last Monday at the oral defense, but today marked the official end of my schooling.  At 1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time, I submitted my final and complete dissertation to the UW Graduate School office, with all necessary approvals and signatures.  After a few moments of checking margins, fonts and other technical details, the woman behind the counter handed me a receipt and said "Congratulations Doctor Voght, you're done."

I'm told that in about a month I'll actually come to appreciate this concept of 'done' and stop waking up in the middle of the night panicking about figure legends and referencing, but until then, if anyone comes across the hours and hours of sleep I seem to have been missing for the past two months, could you point it in my general direction?  I'll be the motionless lump atop the mattress.

It takes a long time to print 114 pages in triplicate, and then swap in several color inserts.

As anyone who watched the national news tonight discovered, we've now had an absolutely insane first three days of December, weather-wise.  More precipitation than the entire month of November, with mudslides, flooding, and hurricane-force winds knocking down trees and knocking out power all over the state.  I-5 closed between Olympia and Portland, the entire downtown area of Woodinville underwater...  Here on Capitol Hill at a nice high elevation (and on the third floor!) things are quiet and dry, but over by the boat there was a big mudslide that threatened some condos and closed the main road.  Outside it's once again pouring, and rain remains in the forecast for the rest of the week.

Oh yeah, and apparently I successfully defended a thesis dissertation this afternoon.  All that remains is to make a few final revisions to the document and turn it in to the graduate school office, and then after slightly more than twenty-four years of schooling, I'm done.

Wow.

I'm sure in another week or two it'll finally hit me, but for now... wow.

The dissertation defense is finally scheduled.

Anyone in town on Monday, December 3rd at 2:00 pm is cordially invited to room S-060 in the William H. Foege Building on the UW Campus to watch me give my approximately one hour presentation on what I've spent the past six-plus years working on.

That's right -- through the amazing power of science we've managed to compress roughly 12,000 work hours into a single hour.

As of 5 pm PDT today the first submission of the thesis is officially DONE. The entire thing has been converted into a massive 103 page, 29 MB PDF document, ready to be distributed to my committee tomorrow.

Final tally: approximately 22,000 words, eighteen figures, 163 references, 78 cups of coffee, 60 cups of tea, and one rhinovirus.

So now that my warm-up is out of the way, who's up for NaNoWriMo next week?

Um, yeah.

Oh, and it's apparently going to be sunny and nearly 75 today.

Sleep:
Friday night: 0 hours (thank you six cups of coffee...)
Saturday afternoon: 2 hours.
Saturday night: 4 hours.
Sunday night: 3 hours.
Monday night: 6 hours.
Tuesday night: 5 hours.

On the bright side, I've got 3/4ths of my revisions done, although the remaining quarter is by far the most difficult part.

...not that all (or even most of) that awake time was devoted to thesis work, mind you.

Jasper Jenkins and the Thesis of Doom - Sep 25, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Draft one of the thesis is complete! (Well, the text portion is, at least.) The next few days will be devoted to me making my little laptop cry while trying to do complex image manipulation in Photoshop and Illustrator, and then of course I still have to properly reference and footnote all the prior work that enabled me to do my own research.

The writing is sure to be butchered alive by my adviser, but that's why it's not the final submission...

The thesis rolls along, slowly but surely toward a finish line.

As predicted, updates here have essentially ground to a halt, since I'm not procrastinating from boring lab work and instead am throwing down rambling semi-coherent sentences instead. I'm happy to look back and see that I managed a full month of daily updates as I intended to do, and I will continue with Caturday updates even if nothing comes between them, although I do have many things to post - mostly I'm just trying to limit my distractions to get the real work done first.

Oh, and if you're looking to hire a geneticist let me know - I come quite reasonably priced.

Thesis writing finally has a green light.

This means I'm either going to be hard-pressed to find time to make updates here... or far more likely I'm going to be making a dozen posts per day out of distraction and writer's block.