The worst thing that can happen to you when you are a student and living away from home is when someone you are very attached to is leaving. Well, it’s a mixture of different feelings, you are so happy for them because they have finished their work and are now set to reap the fruit of their hard work but the mere thought that your days will not be the same again leaves you sad. This feeling is perhaps unique to Ph.D. students with flexible timings, the morning coffee breaks and office gossips fuels one’s day. We tend to finish what we need to do so we can have a quick coffee break and a long gossip session. But this is life, and as my best friend Mashael Al-Omar is submitting her thesis, I just wish her the best even though I will miss her dearly.
Well, speaking of thesis submission, the process is dreadful. You spend three or four years doing a research then you need to sum it up in a way that reflects your hard work “with the exception to the wasted time, come on, that is just part of the process,” not only that, it’s ironic how reviewers when they look at your work might discard all the very interesting findings and contribution to knowledge presented in your work and get irritated by the misplaced comma or misspelled word. And for me as I am not a person of details, my supervisor will at the first glance on any submitted work usually narrows his eyes and just point out the different fonts used for different headings. “Hatooon! Hatooon! fix this, don’t treat me as a copy editor.”
When my friend was preparing her work for submission, I witnessed just part of the sufferings, endless chapters with zillions of versions, one for the supervisor and the other for the proofreader and then one version is corrupted and the other if fixed without the final corrections made, the list of references is done, but then comes the realization that they are not all are in sync with the agreed style, some of them are not indented enough to the left and the proofreader is not responding anymore, a chapter is removed to be printed separately and then that chapter is not numbered properly, which means the whole numbering system, which includes table of contents and lists and tables needs to be fixed before daring to print, it’s a disaster if you printed a whole thesis with around 100,000 words and then you discover that the numbering system is a mess.
And yes, after all the suffering, the thesis is done and all this mess is ready for printing and then submission. And even after printing, it might be discovered that the font used is smaller than the standard, which means three copied of the 100,000-word thesis needs to be printed again.
Wow, that’s scary, for someone like me who loves creative and if I might say messy writing I am not at all looking forward to this. I love analyzing and discovering findings and writing papers, but I dread details like numbers, headings and all of the stuff that sadly makes your work looks professional. I think the average person who cares about details might need a complete four or six weeks just for commas, headings, fonts and other stuff, but I might need four or six months. Well, I think it’s just wise to budget time properly toward the end and give extra time to those small stuff, and whoever said “don’t sweat the small stuff,” he/she has never done something similar to a Masters or Ph.D. thesis, so I am confidently asking him to take back his words and apologize to all the people he misled.
Good luck to everyone who are about to submit their thesis soon.
@ HatoonKadi
