Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

I submitted my thesis to Dr. Ostrowski for the first round of format reviews. This is not insignificant. I’m sure there will be several details to correct, from getting the freakin’ page numbers right to whether the imported GAO pdf. graph, in blue, should be in black and if the Blackwater photos I’ve used should be “real” photographs, not lifted off a website. Oh, joy.

One major oversight in the ALM Manual – there’s no guidance or “cheat sheet” on how to format the thesis on computers. The ALM program seems to take perverse pride in the fact that the Manual is geared towards doing the thesis on a TYPEWRITER!!

[Are you joking? No.]

The Manual was updated in 2003. You know, when computers were in full swing and students were using them extensively. But we poor schmucks doing the thesis in this department have to follow formatting requirements that were written when Methuselah was alive.

Given that every grad. student in the ALM program has to write a thesis and meet these standards, you’d think they’d do a guide sheet to getting this done on Word. And we all know that Word 2003 works differently than Word 2007. Creating sections and page numbering is not exactly the same in each version.

No. Each one of us has to reinvent the wheel every time.

For instance, the front matter cannot have page numbers on the abstact or blank second page. You must use roman numerals on the rest of the front matter: dedication, acknowledgments, TOC, and tables and figures pages. The regular numbers start with Chapter One and are displayed beginning on the second page. The first page of each chapter and new section/appendices/etc. has a top margin of 1.5”, rest are 1” all around with a left margin of 1.5” (for binding). The title page is particularly buggy – special margins and spacing unto itself.  Did I mention you also have to suppress the page number on the first page of each chapter?

After all the work that goes into the thesis, when you’re in the final stretch, having worked on the dang thing for a year (or more) and lived with the revisions and redrafting, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the ALM office had the heart to make a cheat sheet available, a download perhaps on the Thesis Resources page? Yes. Yes it would.

I diverge from my usual, serious subjects to offer a brief social commentary…

Twitter’s for twits. Sorry to break your narcissistic heart, but if God wanted everyone to pay attention to you, he wouldn’t have invented the rest of us. Get a life, then don’t write about it.

Thank you, Gary Trudeau.

Here’s my take on the devolution of conversation, from dialogue to monologue to “who cares?”:

letter-writing >> email >> IMg >> Facebook >> twitter

For those who have seen Idiocracy, I’d argue that we’ve already moved into the first phase.

To achieve the correct page numbers for this exercise, you must use Sections in Word. I’ve got both Word 2007 and 2003. After tussling with Word 2007 last weekend for a couple of hours to make the thesis page numbers come out right, I switched back to 2003. May be no difference but I find 2003 is much simpler.

My “go to” guy on all things computer, Ian, and I discussed this problem this week. He had the added hurdle of using Word on a Mac. Here’s a bit of his experience with the page number beast.

The Section solution works. I now have the thesis in two sections: the regular numbers start on page one of the first chapter and the roman numerals are on the front matter and they start after the title page. But, I have one final problem however: I need to get the roman numerals off two of the front matter pages (copyright and the abstract). Also, Ian mentioned that the Appendices shouldn’t be numbered so there’s a second issue. I gather I’ll have to make more sections. He suggests that I backup each version I’m revising as I fuss around with sections so I can go back to the earlier version if something really gets hosed. I concur.

Given that this formatting issue comes up for every ALM student, it would be beyond “nice” and into the realm of “part of the tuition” for the ALM Manual to have a cheat sheet on this essential task. Or, the ALM website to have a download. Here’s the Microsoft Word help page on this — you can choose to look at 2003 or 2007; and one in 2003 for page and section breaks.

I’ve finished doing the last touches on the revisions of the thesis for my second round of feedback from my TD on the whole thing. I’ve heard that some students get sick of their topic but I can say that hasn’t happened to me.

I am however sick of revising.  I pulled some material out of the Lit. Review and put it in the Background, as directed in the first round of feedback a month ago. But as I was putting some material from the Results chapter into the Background, I discovered that felt like I was pulling too many threads on the whole tapestry.

It’s one thing to revise; it’s another to find yourself beginning to actually re-write the damn thing.

This second complete draft is now 110 pages (sans biblio). Perfectly respectable. (Dr. O mentioned at the last thesis writers’ group that someone had turned in a thesis at a whopping 700 pages. Now that’s just ludicrous.)

So I have put my red pen away. I am now moving to the horrible task of putting all the chapters together.

Plus I did the brave/idiotic thing (time will tell) of moving my thesis draft from my utterly slow Dell Inspiron with Word 2003 to my faster Dell Vostro with Word 2007. Converting each chapter was fine. We’ll see how this goes as I put it all into the meat grinder. Pagination seems to be the bane of my efforts.

Today I finished revising my thesis. Let’s take a minute and let that sink in : )

OK, I confess, I have to review it once more, read it through as one whole piece, not isolated chapters. But still…

The next step is to get it to my TD for one final read. She has already told me that she doesn’t expect to make further revisions at that point, just some minor suggestions. Then, I give it back to her for a grade and Dr. O. gets it simultaneously to begin his format review.

After a year and a half of working on this project, a very solitary venture, I’m beginning to look beyond Harvard and focus on the job search. After four years in the program, it will be wonderful and yet weird to have it all behind me soon.

On a related topic: at this week’s thesis writers’ group, Dr. O. mentioned a couple of things I thought I’d pass on for those of us near the end of the thesis process (and those just curious):

1. once Dr. O. has reviewed and approved the thesis in April, if you make ANY changes, even one word, he wants to see it before it goes to the bindery. Someone made a minor change in his Acknowledgment page, didn’t run it by Don, and “got it wrong”.

2. when we go to get it bound, take a hard copy (as many as you need bound). Flashdrives are ok but problems can arise. For instance, when someone did that last year, none of the charts got printed. Ouch. Apparently, the word processing program the student used and the one the bindery used to print it with were not in synch. Print it out on the appropriate paper and just say: “bind this”.

It’s customary to get 3 bound copies: one for the ALM office, one for your Director (but not required), and one for yourself. As for myself, I’ll get 4 (one extra — it’s not the kind of thing you can replace easily).

3. The process goes thusly: for a June graduation, you submit the finished thesis by April. The ALM Office gets it up to Grossman Library by June or July. It stays there for five years. It then goes to the (bowels) archives in Pusey. And you get the lifelong delight of being able to look up your name in Hollis.

4. The ALM office is discussing revising (finally!) the ALM Thesis Manual over the summer. It’s long overdue. He described the process of delving into the revisions as “life-threatening”. Anyone who’s worked in higher ed. can appreciate that. It’s akin to a committee trying to create a horse and instead producing a giraffe.

On Monday I will submit the first complete draft of the thesis to my faculty director. She’s a bit behind (copy-editing her new book) so she hasn’t seen the results and findings chapters I submitted in early December. We’re still ok on the schedule since I built extra time in the end phase for whatever might slow things down.

I’ve spent the past few days finishing and fixing minor issues:

1. getting accurate page #s on the Appendices

2. putting the Figures and Tables together

3. trying to figure out why Word (2003) adds a blank second page when I switch page length after the first page (in the ALM manual, the first page of each chapter has a top margin of 1.5″ but the rest of the pages have a top margin of 1″). Still haven’t quite figured that out. Not a problem at this point but I need to get it right before sending it to the printer (two major steps from now)

4. update the Table of Contents (no page numbers yet, as I haven’t created one complete document; chapters are still separate documents)

5. making a flashdrive back up of my work

6. moving my biblio from RefWorks to a regular Word file. RefWorks has been glitchy on a few types of entries, e.g., government testimony, hearings, documents. It totally hosed a testimony citation last week so I emailed them, never got a great answer, and decided to transfer the file to a word document and finish the last few entries manually. I’d have to do that anyway to insert it into the master file for my director.  Also, I had a couple of weird entries that would show up only in the print view but not the database. Had RefWorks delete those, wherever they were

7. wondering if there are any other appendices or figures to add, such as a good map of Iraq.

I hope to hear back from my director by mid-February. As of Tuesday, I put the thesis aside, for a while. Tuesday is all about Barack. That’s going to be a great day!  Wednesday I begin career search activities. WIth one career behind me, a serious recession around us, and having been out of the workplace for several years, I need to start figuring out how to and where to get back to work  : )

On that topic, one friend, a Harvard Law alum, has been home with her kids for a few years after Hill & Barlow closed. She’s started looking again (her specialties are corporate mergers and bankruptcies) because she’s not sure her husband will be employed much longer. Another friend, finishing her Ph.D. at Brown, has a great job offer, tenure-track, at the top school in her field. Her husband is flying out there with her next week to see the school and figure out if he can dislodge himself from New England.

I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking as my solution to elbow and wrist tendonitis. The problem is Dragon is a nightmare. I used to love it when it worked but it’s so glitchy that those moments of bliss are rare. It hangs up when I have a pdf open too long (”document is not tagged…” baloney), it won’t capitalize (it puts completely different words in and won’t cap no matter how hard I try), it begins putting each word in caps out of the blue, it arbitrarily starts putting extra spaces between each word as if it’s “right justified” but it’s not. I’ve got Dragon 9.0 on my Dell Inspiron and have used it for a couple of years off and on. Then I got a Dell Vostro and put Dragon 10 on it. Problem is: Dragon 10 goes with the Word 2007 program I loaded but it turns out I find Word 2003 is just simpler and easier. I’d actually have to learn Word 2007 (there are way too many choices and finding simple, quick commands is a chore until you learn where/how everything is).

Don’t get me started on the ultimate hassle of “dictating into a non-standard window”. That happens randomly.

Even when I shut the program down (not a good sign if it doesn’t ask you if you’d like to update your program before it quits) and reboot it, that doesn’t mean it found its brains again. Sometimes the reboot is just as retarded as the first try.

For such a powerful program, it fall so short.

Did I mention that tech support is “fee-based”, even the first call? All I can say is that the tres expensive legal and medical version must be less buggy. If they are as unpredictable and frustrating as the Professional version, the staff assistants who use them would be bald.

Went to the Social Sciences thesis writers group last night. About 15 people there.  Some observations:

1. over the last two years, when I’ve attended, there were always a few students in the midst of actually writing their thesis. Most of the participants, however, were at other stages of the process: just thinking about ideas or working on their proposal. Each year I moved deeper into the process. Two years ago, I had my main topic: private security contractors but no “angle”. Last fall, I was figuring out my focus, my question. Last spring, I was finishing my proposal. Last night, I reported  things have moved along nicely (happily) — I have handed in two chapters and am working on the Results and Findings chapter (due in December). Each year, there were a couple of students, different faces each year, who were well into the thesis writing and then they graduated so you no longer saw them at the group.

So I could see this progression. Last night, it was clear to me, felt good too,  I was the vanguard for this year. I’m one of a handful of people who are deep into it and will be graduating in June. Hearing others around the table talk about the status on their efforts, I remembered listening to those ahead of me last year, like Curtis and Nadia, and wondering if I was going to get where they were.

2. The wide range of ideas at the table. I’m always amazed at how diverse the govt. and history topics are.

3. At every meeting I’ve been to in three years, there are always a few folks off in the weeds. Students who are overly-enamored with their subject but not good at boiling it down to a specific inquiry. Perhaps they’re not really interested in boiling it down — some people like hanging out in the weeds. That’s fine but not if you really want to graduate. (and I’m well aware some folks don’t want to but that’s another post).

4. Those enamored with their subject often take too much air time! Dr. O. is not a highly-directive group facilitator : (     Unfortunately, this translates into some students having much less time (or none) to talk about their work.

5. One technical tip: CMS does not offer much direction in the way of citing a variety of government documents. Don reminded us that you need to cite fully but regardless of how you cite something, be consistent throughout the paper. The point of a footnote (or endnote) is that someone reading your work can find your references.

6. In the “technical” portion of the evening, Don noted that the ALM Manual was written with a typewriter in mind.  Think about this for a minute. The latest edition is 2003.  The thesis is supposed to look as if it were done on a typewriter? That’s just weird in 2008. It was weird in 2003. It would have been odd in 1998! Update the ALM Manual.

7. And last but not least, in the very good news category, Don said that the ALM office will be working to make the theses available online so anyone can access them (next best thing to being in ProQuest/ABI) and a thousand times better than just being in print in Grossman! I think Ian Lamont will be very happy to hear this. He graduated last year and advocated for this for some time.

Having just bought a new Dell (Vostro) and had some problems with it (see earlier post), I began to wonder if using Word 2007 would be a bad idea (we loaded the new computer with Office 2007 but I’ve been using Word 2003 on my Dell Inspiron for several years). Short answer: I’m back with the Dell Inspiron and Word 2003.

Using Word 2007 for a few weeks, it’s much more elaborate and therefore, to me, less useful and efficient than Word 2003. Too many choices. (No wonder so many Americans are less productive and more frustrated at work). My recommendation for doing a thesis if you are facile with Word 2003 and don’t need (why would you?) the many (I would argue, superfluous) additional choices and features of Word 2007, don’t do it! Having heard horror stories from those who tried to fix problems in formatting in Word 2003, I am not optimistic that Word 2007 would truly be better. My cumulative experience with computers and technology is that “new” doesn’t equate with “better”. New often equates with the new business model, “Fix in field”. Ugh.

Final note: I use Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s a fabulous program…when it works…which is most of the time. However, when it doesn’t (e.g., “dictating to a non standard window”) it’s very frustrating. I learned the hard way that Word 2007 needs Dragon 9.5 to work with it. I have Dragon 9.1. When I downloaded the Dragon upgrade to 9.5 on my Vostro, it somehow killed my Word 2007. Nice : ( So I am using the Inspiron which has Word 2003 and Dragon 9.1 and they both get along just fine.

I just bought a Dell Vostro 1500 with XP (my older Inspiron 8600 is good but beginning to show its age). Once I put Outlook Express on it, the keyboard began lagging (in Word, Google, email, etc.). If you have a ‘lagging’ or ’sluggish’ keyboard issue with a Dell, don’t count on Dell support to fix it. On a ‘live chat’ they downloaded three drivers and (wait for it) replaced the bios : 0

The new AO6 bios did not turn my computer into a ‘brick’ but the problem remained. Ultimately, I think I’ve found the problem – PCMS.exe file. The Dell community support page was helpful (not Dell, the users themselves). Clearly, the new computer business model is FIF (fix in field). And when that doesn’t work, it’s FUBAR. After consulting with my highly-paid nephew who does computer work for a hedge fund and messing around on my own, it seems that going into “Task Manager” and shutting of “PCMS.exe”, the keyboard does not lag. Bad news is I have lost the spell checker in my OE (it checks every word). I think the downloaded stuff from the Dell session did that. I may be returning the Vostro (too bad since it’s very fast and has a webcam) : (

For now, I’ve reloaded all my thesis files and others back on the Dell Inspiron. But, it’s over three years old, locks up too often, Word seems to have a problem too; and, most of all, I don’t want Vista as an OS (there are conflicting reports as to whether XP is even available anymore). As for a new computer, doubt I’ll buy another Dell ; )

Postscript: seems the problem has been fixed by upgrading from Outlook Express 6 to Outlook. The snag came from using the Contacts in Express. Once I deleted the Contacts (couldn’t find their main folder, just deleted the contacts), it’s been fine. I can let PCMS.exe run – don’t have to stop that process. The Vostro is a business computer so I guess they didn’t expect users to be using Outlook Express for email. Problem solved. Dell is vindicated…well, their LiveChat could have pointed me to the real culprit, so I guess I can’t go that far! They know the problem exists and the solution is out there in the users forums.