This, let me tell you, was anticlimactic.
Everything else about my dissertation and the end of the Ph.D. until now was an exciting roller coaster (more on that in a future post), but this last leg of the process, one which may not even have ended yet, was just so tiresome and boring even. I know it's mostly my fault and I admit it.
- I was really STUPID not to have written every single dissertation chapter using the template provided by the university. That alone would have saved several hours because I'd be using the correct margins from the beginning and not finding out on May 7 that all my chapters had a 1.25 left margin when they were supposed to have 1.5. (changing the margins implied having to check and adjust the formatting of the whole chapters, including tons of tables and charts).
- I could have learned how to use MS W0rd effectively so I could have avoided the insane task of entering page numbers by hand in my Table of Contents and Lists of Tables and Figures... (I entered them in another W0rd doc that was all messed up, just so my poor husband could cut and pasted it into the final version).
- and many other Things I Did Wrong, like not using Endnote (my university library had RefWorks and that didn't work well) for my bibliography and having to type it manually. On the day the dissertation was due to the graduate school (in the end it was comforting, but I'll tell you why later, if I ever get around to writing the dissertation submission post, after I write the defense photos post, you get the idea ;-)
OK, I have to go to bed, but here are the stats:
- 489 pages + 21 pages of title, acknowledgments (4!), abstract, table of contents, etc. = 510 total pages
- Table of Contents: 5 pages long, because I have so many subsections...
- 33 tables, 46 figures (most pie-charts)
It's a 3.91 MB PDF, but the moment the graduate school says the formatting is OK, I can email to whoever wants it. Let me know :-)
I just hope I don't have to make many changes/ corrections.
I can't participate of commencement if the dissertation is not cleared beforehand. I don't know if they have a deadline for that, maybe the day before ;-)
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Wow -- that is a ridiculously long dissertation! I'm always surprised at some dissertation lengths, since I came from a department that put a high premium on dissertations under 250 pages (and was annoyed with dissertations longer than that). I even had one professor in graduate school who, when assigning research papers, would say, "If you can't say what you need to say in 15 pages, it's probably not worth saying!" Funny how different the conventions are in different disciplines and different departments!
Good for you for getting this in and FINISHED. No matter the drama surrounding the completion, it's still DONE. Congratulations!
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