Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

I got the final revisions from Dr. O this afternoon. Five very small changes. He doesn’t need to see them; he’s signed off, telling me it’s ok to send it to the bindery when I’m done!  Hallelujah.

I’m going to print two copies at the bindery. I’ll keep one and give the other to the ALM office and see if it passes muster. If so, I’ll have four more copies bound (TD,  2 family members, and an extra for me).

: )

Oh happy day.

I submitted my first round of revisions to my advisor April 9. Still waiting to get the thesis back for a second round of revisions (it was in great shape however, this next round should be only very minor issues). The official deadline to get the thesis to the bindery is April 15. That deadline is not real. I’ve contacted Dr. O twice. As of yesterday, April 20, he didn’t have it done yet. So there will be another round (most likely) and we’ll repeat this exasperating process.

This creates some frustration. The April 15 deadline is clearly unreal. It takes two weeks (normally) to get it printed/bound which the ALM office knows full well. You can pay the rush fee for two day turnaround but that’s unfair when the student wasn’t the holdup. The next deadline is May 15 — when we are supposed to have the bound copy to the ALM office. If they don’t have it, you don’t get your diploma June 4. You can walk but there’s only an empty envelope waiting for you onstage. Nice.

This was after I got the initial submission to him two weeks early, which he was glad about but he didn’t get to it to take advantage of my early effort.

So here we are. Just as others in years past have learned, this final formatting phase is kind of pain. (Previous grads have said they had to stay on top of this to move it along).  Dr. O is deluged with work but that isn’t the fault of any one student. The ALM office doesn’t have the staff to get the theses reviewed to fit their own timetable. They either need to adjust the schedule or hire more staff (even if only seasonally).

Fair warning to those ALMs about to start their thesis process. This is what awaits you at the other end.

Sigh.

Further thoughts on proofreading this devilish product:

1. I found that a footnote was missing. It was in the body but not in the footnote area. This was something both my Thesis Director and Research Advisor did not pick up. As I went back over previous versions, I saw that it must have gotten deleted a while ago. The only telltale sign was a footnote separator line (2″) but no footnote. For a while I thought it was a formatting mistake by Word but it turned out that there really was supposed to be something there. I tried creating the footnote in the “draft” view, “show footnotes” option. But it only went in as 12 point and no way to make a superscript.  So I ultimately deleted the footnote in the body and re-introduced it. That’s the easy solution.

2. By adding the a- and b-headings into the TOC, it meant extra effort to be sure I had all the page numbers right. Mine is only a 100 page thesis; I hate to think of the formatting work involved for my friend last year who submitted a 250 page thesis.

3.  It’s so annoying to add one additional line of 10 point text to a footnote and have it move some lines in the body to another page. What is seemingly an innocuous event can turn a tightly-formatted couple of pages into a headache. All because we are discouraged from using “ibid”.

4. I did a final reading and found several footnote numbers in 12 point (in the footnote area). Again, my TD and RA missed them.

If I did this kind of academic writing and proofing on a regular basis, it would be an easier process. I’d know the shortcuts and get things sorted out the first time. In the Myers-Briggs world (from my previous career), those who like proofing are sensing (S) types (into detail work) and intuitives are good at the “big picture”.  Any grad. student who says she likes the proofing is likely an “s”. For an extroverted intuitive, this is hell.

I heartily recommend taking a break, leave the thesis corrections overnight, start fresh the next morning. I sailed through the work after doing just that. Handed in the first round of corrections to the ALM office this morning.  Everyone is supposed to get their final version to a bindery by April 15 (next Wed.) but I don’ think that’s going to happen — and I got my thesis to Dr. O two weeks early — which didn’t matter since he didn’t look at during that time : (  .

My submission today looks sharp. With this set of corrections, it wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. O said “send it to the bindery” or “here are few more things to fix” but those should be really minor.

I just submitted my graduation survey and ordered my commencement tickets. The thesis is in final, formatting review. I’ve already bought a Mac Book for my new endeavor. The end of this four year journey is near. : )

The end is near for this blog also. My goal was to document the thesis process and that’s just about over. I’ll be archiving this and moving on in the next month or so.

My thesis director shocked me today when she sent an email with the grade and comments! I expected to pick up her notes this week from my final revision and hand it back to her next Wed. for a grade and get the comments in a few weeks. So, this was all out of the blue.

As I was checking my Harvard email, her message popped up. I am thrilled – I got an A. Her opening note in the formal comment section is:

This is one of the best ALM theses I have had an opportunity to read and grade.

OMG. Wow. Frankly, I’m not one to blow my own horn, but this is worth an exception.

I am about to be a Harvard alum. Finally. After four years of work, writing, research, exams, money, time, sweat, and occasional bouts of uncertainty (in my own mind, I admit; my family has had full confidence in my abilities all along).

This kind of validation doesn’t happen too often. Even though I’ve been an A student all along with a 3.8 cum but still…this is fabulous.

This has been a great week! First two job offers; one I accepted. Now this. Life is very good right now.

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’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.

One of the challenges of doing the thesis at the stage where you’re submitting materials (chapters, whole drafts) over time — keeping your versions straight. I have set up a “submission folder” to track the versions w/dates in the folder title.

My TD chose to do hand-written notes so we are not “tracking changes” via Word (which is Ok w/me). Organizational skills are an unsung but necessary skill for keeping the stress level down. : )

A format issue that dogs me: making the top margin 1.5″ on first page of each chapter but 1″ on the rest of the pages: easiest solution: make whole chapter 1″ on top and just move the text on the first page down .5″.

Also, I’ve been sending chapters as separate word documents, not compiling the whole draft. as one document…yet.

Proofing the thing is another joy : (     During intense writing/revising periods, it pays to leave it for a few days and go back to see it with fresh eyes.

My TD and I sat down Wed. for about 40 minutes to review her comments from her first read of the complete draft. She likes the work. No need for further research. Just “wring out the fat” and redundancies and move some material around/re-org. a bit.

She prefers to read the next/final revision on a long flight so I’ll try to get it to her by early March for a South American trip.

One of the very few comments on content: she wants to know just how are these contractors armed? RPGs? Machine guns? Pistols? She wants me to paint a clear picture that they aren’t like security guards at the mall but somewhat more like soldiers, without the uniform.

The fact is even tho RPGs are not allowed, some PSCs have been caught carrying them in Iraq : )

Maybe I”ll include RYP’s (Pelton’s) picture of the PSC crew in Iraq (see last week’s BWater post).