Thesis Deadline
I set the deadline for submitting my doctoral thesis based on the waiting
period needed for scheduling the orals (9 weeks) and the summer holiday
schedule of the four professors on my thesis committee. There will also
be an external examiner (a professor from another university) who needs
to get a copy of the revised thesis following the feedback and approval
of this committee. This external professor needs enough time (six weeks)
to read the thesis and to submit a report prior to the orals. I will
have a departmental defence coming before the orals. I felt that setting
the date for thesis submission on May 31 would help me to get everything
done so my orals could be scheduled for early in the fall. Starting in
September I am to resume full time teaching. Also in September, the
high tuition fees for the new school year at the institute (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca)
will need to be paid again for another year. (yikes!!!)
The Last Hours of May 30th, 1999
This story of the last hours of preparing my thesis for submission
began on Sunday, May 30th (full moon...woooo). At this point in my doctoral
career, I was in a holding pattern. I still needed final approval from
my thesis supervisor for the two last chapters of the thesis, (analysis
and summary) - Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight. Seven had three major rewrites.
I had gone through some resistance on the latest rewrite of Chapter Seven
but had finally completed it. Eight was close enough the first time to
have gone through one rewrite. I was waiting for final revision notes on
these two chapters.
Due to her usual busy schedule, I was unable to talk with my supervisor until late on the Sunday evening - she called at my request at about 11:15 and we talked until midnight. I wrote until 4 in the morning to incorporate her recommendations. I put the printed copy (46 pages) at the door of the proof-reader at 5 AM then I slept a couple of hours.
May 31st, Monday morning
At 10 AM I went for a final formatting session at the institute. A
woman I'll call Sue in this story, is an expert on style sheets for the
thesis. I handed her the diskette with a copy of my thesis on it. Sue found
a virus on my diskette that was associated with the transcripts used in
the thesis. These transcripts I had paid to have typed by a student. There
were 17 interviews done - 55 hours of typing. I didn't regret the expense,
but I wasn't happy to find the virus. Sue had a program that removed
the virus from the diskette thankfully. At home I would need to disinfect
all of the drives on which I have thesis work.
Sue and I worked steadily for two and a half hours. When things would snarl up she would chide the computer for "getting its knickers in a knot". In this session Sue tidied up things, working with reveal codes. Her eagle eye interpreted all of the little word processing markings in an instant. I watched her battle the Word program, subduing and taming the beast. I' m glad to know that even experts have to do some operations repeatedly to finally get them to work. Sue has a zippy workhorse of a computer with lots of breathing room on Drive C and plenty of RAM.
We got the Table of Contents ready, the charts were working, the pages were ready for bibliography and appendices, the title page was done, the abstract, the acknowledgements page and boom - we did all that could be done at that point. After the session with Sue, I rushed upstairs to pick up the copies of Chapters Seven and Eight left by my supervisor with her notes for revisions as we had discussed in that late night session.
At 12:30 PM
I had an appointment with my doctor for a session. I went along briskly
and was about ten minutes late. I have never known him to be on time anyway.
Sure enough he was on the phone with a patient and I had to wait ten minutes.
I used the time to sip a little water, to get centred, and meditate. We
had about a forty-five-minute session. I was aware of the backpack at my
feet containing the diskette with the copy of my thesis and of the clock
ticking on my deadline day.
I needed to get home to my proof-reader but the doc suggested lunch. We often have lunch together after the monthly session. I figured that since I had to eat sometime why not with a friend. We both adore sushi and so we headed for a nearby Japanese restaurant. Although it was deadline day I was determined not to seize up with stress. The restaurant was very busy so we seemed to have waited longer than usual - he had a patient waiting for him and of course I had my thesis waiting.
About 3 PM
I got home and found the proof-reader's copy of Chapter Seven along
with notes for corrections. By now the clocks were all starting to tick
loudly. Yes, this was the day when I visualized myself putting a thesis
in each of the four mailboxes belonging to the members of my committee.
I immediately did the revisions for Chapter Eight and gave it to the proof-reader.
I then started working on the corrections for Chapter Seven. I printed out the chapter before I remembered that I also needed to input the revisions marked on the copy from my supervisor. I put those in and printed again. Then I remembered that I hadn't converted the citation coding for the bibliography. I couldn't do that until I had done the corrections for Chapter Eight and I needed to get that from the proof-reader. So I began inserting the appendices until the proof-reader had time to read Chapter Eight . (I paid him to be on call for the day - cheap at $100.)
I started printing the Chapters One through Seven. The proof-reader helped me feed the printer so I could take a bathroom break, walk around the house and feed the impatient cat. It wasn't until I had printed the first six chapters that I realized that I still hadn't converted the citations to bibliography. Time for a bigger break. I was making mistakes in my rushing so I decided to get up and go out for dinner.
Dinnertime and References
Two friend/neighbours wanted me to join them to go to a local restaurant.
This Greek owned corner cafe was packed to celebrate the 25th anniversary
of the business. The menu was from 25 years ago and so were the prices!
We each got a full meal for $2.95. Our waitress was swamped so I was getting
pretty restless to get back to the computer by the time we finished.
I went back to the appendices. Converting the html pages to regular documents so the pages could be numbered was tedious and picky work. I got the corrections for Chapter Eight from the proof-reader and made the changes. Now I could convert the citations. I used a computer data base program called EndNote for compiling my references. When I did the conversion, | discovered that forty-six of the several hundred references would not format! Frantically I went through the document to see what was wrong. Oh no! I had inserted the page numbers in the wrong position on those forty-six references.
I had to go into the thesis and one by one, remove those misplaced page numbers and put them in the correct position - very fiddly work. I finally finished this and went to save and to my horror, my computer will not save the work. I had not done a save since before the appendices work so hours of work were on the line But no - the message read "cannot save" to C drive, to D drive, to E drive (my three hard drives), to F drive (my back up drive on Zip disk) or to A, the floppy drive! I kept copies of my thesis on these drives for safety but could not save to any of them!
Help!
I put in an urgent call to my friend and colleague, Dr. Tips (he has
a book and a web page, specializes in Windows tips). I got his answering
message. Who knows when he would be in? It was getting late, and May 31
was drawing to a close. What about my goal? I bit the bullet and restarted
the computer. When I looked, I'd lost the insertion of appendices and the
citations corrected. Back I went, redoing the work. Dr. Tips called. Yes,
it was because my clipboard had been overloaded (all those copy and paste
routines) and because I had so much packed on Drive C that I didn't have
room for a big clipboard file.
Dr. Tips told me the solution to the "won't save" problem. It's enough to make you weep. When your clipboard is so full that your computer refuses to save your document, here's what you do. You go to the Windows accessory Wordpad and create a new file typing in only a few letters. Now the clipboard has only a small amount in it and you will (supposedly) have room to save the word document you were working on. Well - that was like closing the barn door after all the horses were gone. I found out too late to do me any good this time - but I pass it along just in case someone out there needs to know it. (http://www.drtips.com)
I thanked Dr. Tips anyway and went back to my work. By now I'd let my proof-reader off the hook. He'd been calling to see what more he could do but I couldn't print until I had everything perfect and I still had to redo the forty-six citations, put back the appendices and make a new table of contents before I could print.
Beyond Midnight
I wrote the members of my committee an e-mail message. I told them
that I had gone slightly over my deadline but that they would still have
the thesis in their mailboxes the morning of June 1. I finally compiled
everything and I started to print a little after 2 AM, feeling a little
(but not a lot) sorry for the neighbours who have their bedroom directly
below my office. . I printed one chapter at a time, checking in print preview
to be sure nothing had slipped out of place. I wanted no orphan subtitles
or extra spaces between paragraphs.
At 3 AM I went to the garage and got out the car - it was still a dark and rainy night and I didn't feel like walking to the 24-hour printing place between my house and the university. I went to the counter and I left my precious cargo with instructions to make four copies and to bind them along with the original. They told me they needed until 8 AM. I then went home to sleep for a couple of hours.
Print Pickup
I returned to pick up the copies of the thesis around 8 AM. Again
I had my car and by then it was really pouring. There was testy rush hour
traffic to deal with. I found that the print shop staff had not bound the
original as ordered so I had to wait for that to be done. As I waited I
looked with pleasure at this fat, 228-page document in its bound form.
I lifted it - hmmm, fairly heavy. I looked inside.
Hmmm - ah yes, the list of figures - let's see how the charts look - but wait a minute - all of the page numbers for the seven figures listed on the page for the list of figures were wrong!!! Oh, no! I didn't check them again after the last time I created the table of contents (which is done after re-inserting the appendices and the bibliography). I calmly asked the clerk if I could buy a bottle of white-out liquid. She went looking for some to sell and didn't find any. Perhaps out of sympathy because the order had not been done correctly, she reached into a drawer and gave me the shop's bottle of white-out. Gratefully, there was still some liquid left in that bottle.
She retrieved the freshly bound original copy of the thesis and I paid the bill. I then asked for a plastic bag to put my precious copies in. Oh, sorry, they discontinued using plastic bags. But it was raining hard outside I objected - "Do you know what water does to paper?" I asked. I had to settle for putting the five copies of the thesis in a cardboard box. I held the umbrella over the box, not me as I juggled things to get the box into the trunk of my car. Thank God for the car. Now the traffic was even more fiendish.
I aggressively wormed my way into the correct lanes to get to the institute parking garage. I remembered notices that the garage was being worked on - please let it be open. Yes - a mere $8.00 later I was heading into the bowels below the building. What was being worked on were the elevators. Up I went by the cement stairs from level five to the main floor. From there I took an elevator to my office on the 10th floor. There I spread out the copies of the thesis and carefully whited out the page numbers on the list of figures for each. My thesis was no longer the perfect document. However, I was now grateful to the printers for not having all the copies ready or I might not have caught this mistake.
Nearly Perfect
I re-numbered each of the pages for the seven figures by hand in black
ink. I had large paper clips with me and to the front of each of the four
copies for committee members, I attached the short, charming letter I had
written, thanking them for their reading and comments, reminding them of
the timelines for orals. The letter was illustrated with a graphic I had
created of a cat at the computer. I headed upstairs to the bank of mailboxes.
At the table near the faculty mailboxes I looked for the large envelopes that were usually left there. I would put each copy of the thesis in one of those. The envelopes were not there! According to the clerk they didn't keep them anymore. But I could have plain brown wrapping paper and masking tape. I could just imagine the professors picking up this bundle in plain brown wrapper and tossing it aside like so many clean shirts from the laundry. I couldn't do it. So very gingerly, I placed each thesis with letter attached, naked and virginal in the mailboxes, hoping no brutes would come along and ravage the documents with carelessly crammed mail. My task, for the moment was nearly done. I sent each member of the committee another e-mail message announcing that the delivery had been made. Finally, I called each member of the committee and left a message that the delivery had been made just in case they weren't reading their e-mail.
Going Home
I went downstairs to the computer lab to thank my friend the lab technician
who had been very helpful over the months of writing the thesis. He'd watched
the thing grow from a pup. I invited him to lunch one day soon. I showed
him the bound copy and got a big hug - he'd been with me from the beginning
and the thesis proposal which he'd taken time to read. Next I went to show
the copy to Sue, my style sheet genie - I found her on the phone with a
student who was, yes, of course, working on her thesis. I got another hug
and left her a batch of chocolate turtles to munch on. Then I went down
to the garage, got my car and went home to a very untidy office. It was
done. I'd made my objective - a few hours later than planned, but that
didn't matter in the end - what mattered was I had gone from revisions
of two final chapters to completed printed and bound thesis. The thesis
was submitted. I had reached another plateau in the doctoral journey.