Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Draft done


Pile
Originally uploaded by gecko_12.
After weeks of lots and lots of reading and writing and such, I finally finished a draft of my thesis! I finished proofreading yesterday and printed it up without too much hassle. Then I decided that since I'd printed it double-sided, it would be best if I had it spiral-bound, so as to make it easier for my committee to read. I took it to the UW hospital duplicating office, since the Rotunda copy shop is closed (for how long? indefinitely?). Seems like it would have been a simple job, but when I picked up the bound copies, the pages were out of order and flipped the wrong way. So I had to have them punch new holes and rebind the document - except that now there were holes on the outside edge of some of the pages. This seemed fixable by cutting off that edge, but the guy somehow managed to mangle that too. Instead of cutting the whole document, he only cut the pages with the extra holes. So then I had to have him cut the rest of the pages, which resulted in the document edge being somewhat ragged. In the end I still got 5 copies bound and in the right order, but one copy had margins of about half an inch (instead of the 1.25" I'd started out with) and another copy somehow had some pages ripped. I saved that one for my adviser, figuring he was the least likely to care that some pages were taped back together.

If I'd been on time with all this and finished a draft last Wednesday (when it was technically supposed to be done), then I could have gone back to work, reprinted the document, and gotten it bound again. But I was in such a hurry to get it into my committee's hands that I pushed forward with what I had.

Oh, and then my GSR's office is under construction, so I had to trek all around the south campus trying to find him. And it was kind of hot. And I was flustered from the whole binding thing. So it was a bit of a wacky day.

But at the end of it all, I am done with my draft, and that's a pretty good feeling. Now I just have to work on my presentation, read piles of papers, continue to work on experiments for my manuscript, and clean my apartment before my dad arrives in two weeks!

4 comments:

josh said...

congratulations! I can't believe that you were nice enough to bind your thesis draft. I just e-mailed pdfs to my committee and hoped they had a chance to look at it.

thomas robey said...

Hooray for Marilyn!!!

manganese said...

Thanks very much!

I guess I hoped that by printing it, they'd feel more obligated to read... though probably not.

Nadine Rogers said...

I think finishing the first draft can really be what you called the fruit of your first effort on thinking what your thesis ideas and writing them down to make your thesis project. Anyway, I do hope everything went well with your thesis project. Well, from the looks of it, you know what you’re doing.