Back from the Land of the Thesis

I'm finally back from thesis oblivion. Last Tuesday, I defended my thesis. I passed, but I have this nagging fear that my committee members are going to take a second look at my thesis and decide that I still need to do more work. At the end of my defense, they did give me a few more revisions to make, revisions that my chair said should only take a couple hours to do. And because I had planned to stay in Utah for a few days after my defense in order to make such revisions and submit my thesis electronically, I sat down Wednesday morning to make these "few" changes. Admittedly, I am a perfectionist and a work-aholic, so it took me all day Wednesday (until midnight when the library kicked me out) and a few hours on Thursday to get the changes done. I sent that final version off to my thesis chair around ten Thursday morning to get his seal of approval before I could begin the electronic submission process. Since I was on a fairly tight schedule, and because I had passed by his office a couple times by twelve-thirty with no sign of him, I decided to track him down on his cell phone.

When he realized it was me calling he said, "Oh hi. I'm in a tow truck right now. This morning we went to drop my daughter off at the airport and on the way home, one of the wheels on our car fell off, so I'm not going to make it into my office for a few more hours." Yeah, I sort of felt like a jerk at that moment, for calling to find out how long it would take him to work through my thesis when his car had just fallen apart on the freeway. For the record, he had told me to get in touch with him as soon as I finished making the revisions, and he promised to work through my draft fairly quickly so I could finished submitting it electronically. So I tried to tell him not to worry about it, but he promised to get to it as soon as he could. Maybe he still felt bad about the fact that I had had to remind him that he was my committee chair back in May. Somewhere along the way he picked up the idea that I had made someone else on my committee my chair. I'm still not sure how he got that idea, although at the time, I was tempted to go ahead and make the switch. No wonder I had such a hard time getting much of a response from him between January and May. After I clarified though, that I still thought of him as my chair, he was amazingly easy to get in touch with and very encouraging and helpful. Oh, and I should probably add that he didn't seem to bear any physical marks from the experience of losing a wheel. Mostly I think it was just inconvenient.

So to make a long story short, he okayed my draft by six on Thursday, at which point I began the electronic submission process. I ran into some tricky spots, but I was able to convert it to a pdf and submit it just as they started playing the music in the library to kick everyone out, this time around 9:45 p.m. Unlike the previous night's music, it was fairly inspiring and dramatic, which seemed so appropriate as I was rushing to finish the process before they shut down the computers on me. They had already turned out all the lights, leaving me to work by the glow of my computer monitor. Now I'm just waiting for my electronic version to get approved and then I'll be completely done. Until then I'm trying to relax, but I think I'm going through a sort of withdrawal instead.