6 posts tagged “dissertation”
The biggest excitement of late is that I finally broke down and got a new computer. It was way past time, and doing anything-- anything, including turning it on-- had become a nightmare on the old one. The new one is muuuuuuch faster, and has more storage space, but moving computers it almost as traumatic as moving house... I can't get the contents of my iTunes to move over except for the things that I'd burned from CDs. I can't afford to buy a computer and upgrade to CS3, so I'm still working with Photoshop two versions ago, which is now refusing to open RAW files. I've downloaded the plug in. Twice. No luck. I can't get my website pages to open up in the application I'd been using to make and modify it, and I have things to add to it. And I don't like Vista. All of which is knocking the excitement of a new machine down about fifty notches.
I was on travel for work this week, which isn't so bad, except that I had to go out to the Eastern Shore (also not so bad-- though, am I wrong in thinking that name redundant? Does VA had a Western shore?), which required driving through Norfolk and VA Beach. Which ended up being a six hour traffic back up odyssey. It took almost three hours to go three miles and made me very glad that we don't live in Norfolk.
Eastern Shore was neat. The work part went fine, and I got up early one morning in search of a place to take a jog on the beach, failed miserably at that, and shot some pictures instead. Sadly, the trip ended with a four hour, traffic-laden return. On the upside, while I was gone a few seeds in an herb container I'd planted sprouted. Yeay! Not that this makes up for having lost my entire herb garden in the deluge last weekend, but it's good none the less.
In the meantime, I got an email from a friend at old job, two jobs back, who said my dissertation had arrived. Pardon? I had no idea what he was talking about. He sent them on to me, and while they were en route, I remembered that when I'd initially completed, had signed off, and submitted my diss manuscript to the library at erstwhile uni, there had been a form where you could request (at an outrageous price for what it is) photocopies of your dissertation from UMI, which is the org that does all the copying and microfiching/microfilming of dissertations in the U.S., if you wanted extra copies. I ordered three-- one for my parents, one for my beloved adviser/second committee member, Prof. DKW, and one for my third committee member. They arrived from two jobs ago old job the other day:
And yeah. It has been two and a half years. It has been so long that dear Prof. DKW has passed away since I ordered the frigging things (making me feel sad that he may have thought I'd forgotten him). His widow was deaccessioning his library (which was enormous and amazing), as was he in the last bit of his life, so there is nowhere to send the thing. It's been so long that it's kind of uncomfortable sending it to third committee member-- sort of highlighting that we haven't spoken since the paperwork was finally signed, as well as the oogie-ness of getting all of it done, which was not an easy process, even by doctoral dissertation insanity norms. Obviously, my parents will get their copy. But two and a half years? jeeeeeeez. And I opened it up to find that it is not the print out with nice pictures that the copy I got from my Uni library is-- it's a photocopy. No, really, a photocopy. Two and a half yeas for a photocopy? It's bound in hideous plastic covered cardboard in a shade of blue I can only think if institutional elementary school bathroom tile. Perhaps UMI stands for Unbelievably, Mindbogglingly, Inefficient.
Other than that, I read this article, and was depressed and sad, missing my erstwhile home in PP, and just disgusted to see the way these things fall out....
The last few days have been insane. First I finally got this email:
Wed, Jan 4 2006
Your submission has been accepted and archived in DSpace.
Wheeeee!! So I call the thesis office to make sure that I'm now done and find out that I'm really really not done. The signature page is printed on non-archival paper and will not be accepted until it is printed on archival paper and re-signed by all of my committee members. It's winter break. I'm in DC and everything that needs to get done is in Ithaca. I've spent the last two days calling every office at the university and sending emails to everyone trying to hunt people down. Found one. The admin from my department found the chair. Then I get an email from the third member: he's in Taiwan about to get on a plane to Burma. shitshitshitshit. He says it's fine to have a proxy sign for him. Another prof proxied for the defense, so there is already paperwork on file for him as a proxy. Spend several hours trying to get in touch with that person.... only to find that he is in Cambodia. So, here it is, 19 hours before the deadline, and I am about to have my degree put off again because of archival paper. I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel.
Fuck.
I made a few more phone calls and tried to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to get my degree until May because of something supremely trivial. I mean, I've been waiting eight and a half years for this-- what's another five months? Okay, in the grand scheme of things, not much. But I still want to cry until I throw up.
So I got up at six this morning and started writing emails and then making phone calls. Administrators from three departments were sending things around campus and my friend Myra ran all over the university-- and drove all over town-- to get signatures and drop everything off for me (she gets the five gold star super friend of a lifetime prize). Found a proxy. Signatures done. Dropped off at the office at 10:57-- an hour and three minutes before the deadline.
That's right, people, the Doctor is in. WHOOOOOOO--HOOOO!!!
So I get back from San Francisco late this morning, and I'm totally
beat and jetlagged. I check my email with the plan to take a nap right
afterwards and here is what I find in my mailbox:
Dspace submission rejected: January 3, 2006
To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)
Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:
Jennifer, Great job, just one page that needs correction. Fix the
spacing on the last line on pg 39 and then resubmit.
I don't think this is ever going to end. Is it possible I've enterd some circle of hell? WTF???
Here's what my week has looked like:
DSpace: Submission Rejected Fri Dec 23, 2005
To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)
Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:
I have reviewed your documents and you need to make the
following changes. 1. All margins must be set at 1.6 for the left and 1.1
for all others. The preliminary section is currently at 2.25" and the
main text is about 1.75". 2. Change the heading on the List of
Illistrations to LIST OF FIGURES 3. Fix the widow on pg xxv 4. remove the
page break on pg 222 continue the archival documents cites directly
after the end of the bibliography section. Make the above corrections and
resubmit.
DSpace: Submission Rejected Fri Dec 23, 2005
To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)
Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:
I have reviewed your lateest draft and you need to correct
the following: 1. 24 pt space the title on the title page. 2. In the
preliminary section you have 2 pg xxii's. 3. In the main text you
missing pg 39 and 216 and you have two pg 78's. Also the page #'s don't
correspond to the Table of Contents, check page #'s on the List of figures
also to make sure they are on the correct page. Make these changes and
resubmit.
DSpace: Submission Rejected Thu Dec 29, 2005
To collection: Theses and Dissertations (CLOSED)
Your submission has been rejected with the following explanation:
Just one page that needs correction. Fix the widow on pg
xiii. Move at least one line over from pg xii. Then resubmit.
The first of these took SIX HOURS OF WORK. The second took another two hours. I'm sure the last won't be more than a few minutes. But I feel that I should take this moment to note that I used the template, available online on the Graduate School website under instructions for submitting your dissertation, in order to format this thing. Yes, I had many hours of extra work tacked on to this process because I, stupidly, thought that I could use the template provided by the graduate school without having to correct it. I'm not sure what possessed me to think that the graduate school would provide a correct template. Obviously, I wasn't thinking clearly.
Okay, so it's taking longer than I'd planned to write up those blog posts about the trip. It's taken me a bit to catch up with all the stuff I wasn't doing at work while I was away, and then I went to Chicago to see a friend I haven't seen in ages, and more work when I got back, follwed by a work trip to Pittsburgh, catching up with work I missed when I got back, and then it was Thanksgiving with the cooking and the cleaning and the cooking and the cleaning, and I finally got a response from my advisor on my nearly-all-rewritten dissertation. (Drum roll). Passed.
Finally.
The upside of passing is that I can now forget those eight hellish years and bury my dissertation somewhere in the back of the closet and wait for my future children to dig it out and ask about it. The downside is that it needs to get formatted in such a way that it can be microfilmed or microfiched or whatever archaic form of filing they are now doing. And whatever way that is, it is not the way in which is it now being. Which means a large number of hours must now be dedicated to things like pagination. All of this has to be done to the satisfaction of the Thesis Queen, who Reigns Over Theses and Dissertations At The Library, and needs to be done by January 6th if I'd like to get my degree in January rather than in May. (and I would). Which is all well and good, but for the fact that I am going out of town to a wedding the week before Christmas, and another the week after Christmas (in Florida and California, respectively), and also going home for Christmas itself which, I might add, falls inconveniently on a weekend this year, so that my effective deadline for filing is really December 15th.
Jesus. What am I doing? I gotta go.
Can a dissertation make you sick? I've had a phantom illness- a sore throat that *will*not* go away- for, like, a month. Or more.
At first I thought maybe I'd developed hay fever or something. Not that there's any hay in DC, but still. So I went to the doctor. He didn't seem to think it was hay fever. He gave me antibiotics. I took them and felt a little better for two days, and then it came back. So I went back. He still didn't think it was hay fever. So he gave me more antibiotics. I took those for five days, but they kept making me feel like I was gonna hurl, and then I spent all day yesterday in bed with a stomach ache, so I stopped taking them. Plus, the sore throat came back two days ago. And I've had a headache since Thursday.
Okay, so I eat a pretty balanced diet and I go to the gym and I don't smoke and all that good stuff. What freaking gives?
I'm starting to think that the hovering dissertation is making me sick. Not that I have any proof or anything. I just hate the freaking thing and would really like to give up except that then I'd have to deal with having wasted eight years and doing the defense and blah blah blah and still don't have the damned degree. Well, except that I totally am never going to use it for anything anyway. I mean. I'm not going to be an academic. (will put icepick in ear first). I'm not going to be an "art historian" (whatever the hell that means). Apparently I'm just going to haul this massive stone around for the rest of my days.
So it's making me cranky. The never having a life/free weekend. And then there's that nagging feeling that even if I finally managed to finish it to the satisfaction of my chair, I'd still have wasted eight years of my life getting a degree in, well, nothing.
So that's what I think is making me sick. Either that or hay fever.
