what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff

hey I'm doing a Masters, I technically belong here. But then my experience as a part-time student is nothing like the immense stress and so on you're all on about, I heartily recommend it (although two years to do a Masters is one thing, seven or whatever to do a PhD is slightly different). It's like cheating, but legit. I handed in my work for the semester, a single 5,000 word paper (okay, 6,600, brevity is a skill I've yet to develop), and now I'm technically off until September. But in that time I can start working on my 15,000 dissertation, which is due in in sixteen months. O yeh.

But on the other hand, my experience of a long long line of tiny steps towards something big is making me envious of all you guys with your big scary events.

I just drop into this thread to congratulate the grad-school folk at each hurdle passed; my assigned 8k words is for something else entirely.

Friend is doing a curatorial PhD and is scared she'll get booted off, but over the course of the degree she has been sacked from job for being pregnant, had kid (both mum and kid nearly died), brought successful sex discrimination/constructive dismissal case (org is now trying to play 'if we pay you, we go bankrupt' BS), moved under extreme pressure and has had to do all of this plus lecture part-time at a uni 100+ miles from home with no help whatsoever from her former partner.

It's good to see people making progress! I just finished 6000 words of PURE UNADULTERATED SCIENCE myself (but don't ask how long it took)

i mean, guys, i passed a 30-minute practical exam (doing a physical), still have two weeks of finals and 3.5 years of medical school left

So? Every little counts ... I just put the final fullstop on an essay (which still needs some editing and tweaking, and a reference section) but FUCK IT, YAY ME :)

hey I'm doing a Masters, I technically belong here. But then my experience as a part-time student is nothing like the immense stress and so on you're all on about, I heartily recommend it (although two years to do a Masters is one thing, seven or whatever to do a PhD is slightly different)

Ha, exactly ...

I handed in my work for the semester, a single 5,000 word paper (okay, 6,600, brevity is a skill I've yet to develop)

Wait, what? Jammy sod. Last semester: 11,000 words. This semester: the same. *Shakes fist* :)

y'all made me curious so i checked - mine was 9,730 words.
i think my hueg marketing project last year was twice that though. lol @ joek thesis.

anyway, gbx doing a physical is nothing to sneeze at! lots of doctors suck at it!

ah, you guys with your requirements of less than 100,000 words not including appendices.

yeah, i know i got off relatively easy, but also i'm doing more of a professional thing than a research thing.

: )

I really envy you writer-types. I have 2500 words of a 6000 word paper written and I have absolutely no fucking idea what else to write about, and the damn thing is due in two weeks! There's only so many examples you can write about to support your argument before the reader is like, "OK, I get it. Move on."

caek, I take it that was your dissertation?

one paper between me and freedommmmmmmm

i have a while to go, but I don't remember the last time someone turned in a phd thesis less than 50k in our dept, xp

I have 12K at the moment, but I've got probably another 6K to add on (IN THE NEXT WEEK AAAAAAAAAGH).

travails of the grad school student:

A few hours ago, I was happy because I had added on 3 1/2 quality pages to my thesis. I had it saved on the desktop at the library (note: DUMB). I stepped outside to make a phone call. I got sidetracked, and then was coerced into stopping into a little wine and cheese event, and then I came back about an hour later. It turns out that after an hour, the computers here automatically reboot and delete everything on the desktop. So now I'm sitting here trying to retype the ideas and structure of what I had written before. Aggggggggggh

can i just

http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/images/2006/10/19/dmu_head_in_hands_315x420.jpg

gmail urself

yeah I know how to do it. I didn't expect to be out for an hour and have my data deleted, whoops.

dropbox.com

advice like that is what people who lose files love to hear

Especially people who already know how to use the internet.

Next time I see someone drop their keys, I'm going to walk up to them and be like "hey man, if you don't want to drop your keys, you should think about attaching them to your belt loops with a clip." Later, if I find anyone who didn't finish their taxes on time, I'll inform them that they should probably file their taxes before April 15th next time.

saying "be careful" to someone who has just stubbed their toe

'wear a condom next time'

I like how dropbox.com is not even a legit website.

You need a nice computer monitor?

http://www.nicecomputermonitor.com, duh

Feel your pain! I lost like 2 pages when I was working at the laundromat and my battery decided to randomly die (gotta get this checked out bc it did it again last night!). So frustrating!

hey i dunno if apple are still doing this but they replaced mine for free http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/

if apple *is* still doing this

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-dilemmas-of-graduate-education.html

i don't really have an opinion about this debate and thinking about it doesn't seem like fun, but ymmv.

I only had to learn once that in this neck of the woods, if you open a file from email and forget to save as, you'll be saving to an irretrievable temporary files folder. ho boy.

I think even if I wasn't part-time my workload would be pretty low. Suckas. Another couple of 3,500 word essays would've been me for this semester (although I'd be expected to have a good chunk of dissertation work done by now too. That, though, is only 15,000 words itself).

thanks, harbl! i installed that update but my cycle count is still low. genius bar appt on sunday!

lol i accidentally did that at work last week and almost had a heart attack at the idea of 3 hours of work GONE. i was like 'NO I HAVE BEEN SAVING IT EVERY 5 MIN WHERE DID IT GOOOOOOO?' but the weird thing is i had saved as bc i changed the doc name but it still saved to the temp folder bc i must not have been paying attention!

Ah, man: I feel your pain, Z S. That is seriously sucky. And it happens once in a while to all of us: eg the time I managed to answer "No" to "Save Changes before closing?" (this was at work, with a page that was meant to have been on the press 10 minutes previously) despite ... well, despite obviously meaning to click fucking "Yes".

Grah.

i feel the pain too Z S. could be worse. my tale of grad school geek woe is i spilled water on my laptop two weeks from finishing dissertation chapter 2. all panicky i had that thing upside down like a tent on my rug for two days running, hoping somehow the water would drip out. it didn't of course and my computer was totally fried. after mooching a ride to best buy i found out rust had started forming on my hard drive. somehow they saved all the data though and transfered it onto the new laptop i had to buy i couldn't afford. and then after all that i still had to finish the chapter on time

and did you finish the chapter on time?

I'm heading into the home stretch here (due this coming week), and I need tales of inspiration.

got it in on time, yes. and it turned out to be the proverbial better-than-the-original; my anger at myself and fear i'd fuck up again somehow not only crystallized my recollections of the original material, but fostered a clarity allowing me to see dialectical nuances i hadn't noticed in my first, more innocent go-around. so hop to it! chop chop

slap chop!

you're gonna love my thesis!

Just for fun, to anyone who wants to answer:

How many people do you think will ever read a good chunk of your thesis, besides your advisor(s) and yourself? And for those who graduated from this thread years ago, how many people have read it?

my guess: maybe 1 student in a future class looking for an example of what the thesis is supposed to be (i just know this bc i read two alumni's theses before i started writing mine).

Ha! That's my prediction too. In my program you're forced to read and critique a past thesis. Since I'm one of a very small group of environmental policy students here, there's a good chance my thesis will be critiqued pretty often in the years ahead by those future env. policy students.

pretty much all the novel content of my thesis will have been published in 3 or 4 papers by the time i submit, and probably no less than ten people will read each of those. but i need to put several months into turning those into a coherent 200 page document in order to call it a thesis, and no more than five people will ever read that.

I doubt anyone but me has read my whole 450+ page dissertation, but yeah, I've published chunks of it here and there over the years in journals, and those have been read by a few people (yeah, probably 10 people for each, maybe 20). Although it's hard to tell: once I turned on monitoring on my personal webpage, and posted a new paper, and within an hour it had been downloaded by people with university URLs. So maybe more people read than I'd guess.

I do occasionally get crackpot notes in the mail by people who've read something I've written, and want to tell me their own (bizarre) take on something. Recently I got a long note about the SETI project, by a guy who'd written all over the outside of the envelope as well as all over the notes jammed inside. It's odd as I don't work on anything even mildly related to SETI or astronomy. But it's not the first of these I've gotten. I take them as a badge of honor, like I've arrived as a scholar when crackpots seek me out.

How many people do you think will ever read a good chunk of your thesis, besides your advisor(s) and yourself?

My massive 6,000-word paper/final project will be a revolutionary magnum opus that's gonna totally change the world and get published in the Harvard Business Review and make me a very rich man. If I can finish it on time, that is.

Thesis = FINSIHED.

Can I just
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

I mostly finished it off last week, but today I finished the conclusion, fixed up the reference page, wrote the abstract, spell checked, etc.

woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

http://bestanimations.com/Military/Explosions/Explode-01-june.gif CONGRATULATIONS! http://bestanimations.com/Military/Explosions/Explode-01-june.gif

congratulations

i finished all my big papers, but i have this bullshit 1,000-word "what i learned this semester" busywork essay due monday and i have no motivation to wrap it up, even though it should be easy

good on yer leif. can't beat that feeling...

http://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIF
http://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIF
http://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIFhttp://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20animated%20siren%20gif%20drudge%20report.GIF

How many people do you think will ever read a good chunk of your thesis, besides your advisor(s) and yourself?

my advisor never read a word