Month: September 2017

Thesis deadline approaching.

I’m in the final few weeks of writing up my thesis, with my (self-imposed, but then agreed with supervisors) deadline for a complete first draft coming at the end of the month. It’s surprisingly stressful.

It shouldn’t be. Yes, the deadline is soon, but the amount I have left to do is entirely manageable. Yes, it’s longer than anything that I’ve written before, but the chapters are reasonably self-contained, and any given chapter is shorter than plenty of documents that I’ve written in the past. Additionally, most of those chapters are based on papers* that have been through peer review, so I know that they (probably) can’t be awful.

So given all that, why does the thought of “finishing a thesis” have so much weight around it? I think part of it is that, however unlikely, it’s a potential single point of failure which could render the last 4-5 years of work, arguably, wasted. I think another significant part of it is that finishing a thesis is expected to be heavy and stressful, and one internalises that over the years. When everybody who has done one is sympathising with you and saying “you can do it”, you start to agree that it’s hard.

Anyway. Having procrastinated a bit by writing this… Onwards!

 

* Papers that I wrote, just in case anybody is getting funny ideas 😉

Posted by simon in Reflective