As the U.S. economy implodes, potentially portending hard years to come, I am entering the final round in this circus-like process of getting a PhD in history.
This is the part where you "file" your dissertation. You defended it, the committee signed off on it. Then you have to file to meet the deadline to graduate (which for me to get an October, '08 dated degree is Oct. 3). So I did the defense--my committee signed off in April. I've supposedly been "revising per their comments" over the past months. A few weeks ago, I sent it to my committee again, so that they could pretend to re-read it to make sure I made their revisions, which is unusual and due to the break-neck pace in my case of writing and defending, as well as to my committee fighting within itself. But since they signed off in April, they can no longer stop me from filing, not that any actually seem to have read it the second time. In short, as far as the faculty are concerned, I've jumped through all the flaming hula hoops.
When you file, you have to hand the diss over to your university's library and to the online database of dissertations. This makes the diss publicly available. You can't work on it anymore or make any more changes. You have to do this to get a diploma.
This filing stuff ushers in a new set of dancing ponies and hula hoops, supervised by a new cast of authority figures: the very nice people at the Grad School. They are in charge of making sure you filled out many forms, paid large fees, and submitted the dissertation in a format that accords with the university library's standards.
You might think that after many, many rounds of hula-hoop jumping, miniature pony riding, alligator wrangling, etc., this would be a piece of cake.
But no. At the moment, I am consulting with three other grad students in an attempt to figure out how to have one PDF file with two kinds of page numbers (Roman numerals for the first few pages, Arabic for the rest of the text.) But don't worry. I think I figured it out.
The silver lining: I've been so broke from age 25 to 30, while in grad school, that I have zero dollars invested in the stock market.
5 comments:
Isn't it nice not to actually own anything? Good luck with the hula hoops!
Who are the dancing trolls?
What large fees? There are more fees?
I can't count in Roman numerals past 39. I may or may not be screwed by this. Please elaborate to comfort me.
Well, since your Acknowlegements page will be at least 39 pages long as you thank me at great and flowery length, I advise you look into that Roman numerals situation.
so are you dr. marhoefer now or what???
I could never understand why we use the roman numerals for the front matter but not the notes, index, and so forth. Why not all arabic numerals? Can't we all get along?
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