The Art of Finishing a Master's Dissertation

Because I am supremely good at procrastinating, the bulk of my dissertation writing didn't happen until about a month and a half before the deadline. See, I need the pressure of a looming deadline; that gun to my head to get things done. Considering that, I think I was doing pretty well to have gotten started over a month before the deadline. But according to academic advisors, it should be at least two months to research, one month to write a complete first draft, and one month to edit, rewrite, and proofread. Though I did do some research April through June, I did most of the above steps between mid-July and the end of August. Anyway, this dissertation fought me every step of the way.

First of all, my advisor was close to useless and I had pretty much had to find someone else to read through my first draft. This made it a bit worrisome to keep working because I wasn't sure whether or not I was digging myself into a hole. In the end, it turned out that I was OK. However, it has not been enjoyable to write the thing. It was a slog to get through every one of the 14,757 words that I wrote. A lot of that was written during our my last week in Norwich. Then when I went to London to start my new job, I wrote most of it on our laptop. Every day after work (instead of going back to the hostel to twiddle my thumbs), I went to the British Library and worked on the paper. By late August, I had a 90% complete first draft and I started doing some re-reading and editing. My goal was to finish it by August 30th so it could be printed, bound, and sent to the university on the 1st of September (the deadline was the week of the 5th). I was doing pretty well on achieving that goal, but after our move from Norwich to Winchester that weekend, I was too exhausted to "sprint across the finish line" on the 30th, so I put it off for another day. However, I came home on the 31st with a nearly complete dissertation which I then transferred from the Mac laptop to the PC. I finished writing it that night (barring final proofreading). Kristen was going to read through it again the next day.

Perhaps sensing that I was about ready to send it off on its own, this is when the dissertation started REALLY fighting me. When I got home the next day, the PC would not turn on. I couldn't access the nearly complete dissertation that night. Faced with having to re-write the last 10% of the dissertation, I decided to put it off another day so that I could buy a hard-drive casing that I could use to plug the PC drive into the Mac. The next day I emailed the MA course convenor and the person I would be sending the completed paper to and explained the situation (I had since been told that the 5th was the deadline, as opposed to the WEEK OF the 5th). They told me it was OK as long as it arrived before the end of the week. I though I could finish it Friday night, have it printed, bound, and mailed on Saturday, but no printing places were open on the weekend, even in London. So, I wouldn't be able to mail it until Monday the 5th. Well, I got home that Friday night and tried to boot the PC again: still nothing. OK, time to remove the hard-drive and hope that it isn't THAT which has failed. Luckily it wasn't. BUT, the Mac was not recognizing the PC-formatted hard-drive. Luckily (again), I had a piece of software called "Virtual PC" which allows you to install a Windows operating system into a virtual PC "environment" on the Mac. Then I was able to access the PC hard-drive and successfully transferred the most up-to-date draft over to the Mac. I then hooked up another external drive that the Mac DOES recognize and transferred the file to that so that I could then unload it again within the Mac operating system. Sorry, if this is a bit convoluted, but then I finished the draft, "protected" the formatting, and burned it to a CD. Free at last!

Or so I thought. When I got to work that Monday, I tested the CD in the PC at work. It did not read it. I called Kristen and asked her to burn another copy and try to email me the file from the library (we didn't have the internet at home yet). The PCs at the library did not like that disk either. So, I crossed my fingers and headed to the printing company up the street from where I work. Thankfully, they had a Mac and even more thankfully, the disk was readable. They printed a draft for me to check over. At first it looked fine, but then I noticed that the page numbers were halfway cut off. We twiddled around with the settings and got them to look right. Then I noticed that there were no apostrophes anywhere in the document. Apparently, their Mac did not like the font I was using (nothing crazy, just the standard Arial font) and it wouldn't print correctly no matter what we did. They were about to send me on my way, when I asked them if they could transfer the file to one of their PCs. They scratched their heads and reckoned that they could, so I waited around for this. Yes, that worked, so I checked the formatting and fixed the page numbers again. Then we printed three copies successfully. They bound them without any problems and I paid the £29.99 (with only a little trouble from their credit card reader).

At lunch, I walked to the post office store to send the dissertation to the university, but I still had to buy an envelope. In the UK, it is common for the post office to be inside a department store. If you want to buy an envelope, you have to buy it from the store (you can't buy it from the post office people). Unfortunately, I didn't have enough cash. So, I told them I would get some cashback from the post office people when I paid for the postage. I waited in line, then the PO people told me I couldn't take cash out with the card I had, so I had to LEAVE the store, GO to an ATM, TAKE out some money, GO back to the store, BUY the envelope, STAND in line again (this time much longer), and finally was able to send away those two bleeding copies of my dissertation. Halle-frickin-luiah!

As I left the post office, I wondered what the hell it was about this paper that was so determined to stop me from turning it in. I still haven't figured that out. I received confirmation that they received the dissertation and it was being sent to the graders. So, it's out of my hands now. No idea when it will be graded and sent back though. I'm just so relieved to be done with it. Other of my classmates are still working on theirs. They got an extention. Something I could have done, but decided not to because I just wanted to be finished with the damn thing. Now I never have to think about that thing again. At least not until they send it back to me with my grade.

-RP-