Great Moments in Dissertation History, Part I: So! Happy! To! Be! Finished!

I don't know how many other people's dissertations I've read these past five years.  Hard to tell.  The folder housing however many of them I've downloaded also contains the by-any-reckonings-outrageous number of clippings I've snapped while reading them.  Many of them serve one purpose and one purpose alone:

To make me feel better about my work.  ("At least I didn't write that in my dissertation.") 

I wont' be sharing any of those.  However, I will be sharing the more innocently amusing ones.  I fancy tonight's clip because of the irrational exuberance its author experienced at the mention of a particular novel's subtitle:

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to the year this person filed her dissertation?

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*This and any subsequent posts should be dedicated to the good people at Snag It Industries.  They write fine code.  For all I know—admittedly not much—their service is second-to-none.

Comments

[Sisyphus]

Hooray! Hoorah! *does the cabbage patch in your honor.*

How close how close!?!?!?! Tell us! Tell us everything! Some of us want the play-by-play and up-to-the-minute commentary ---- some of us I might add, who you owe multiple emails --- why don't you just blorp all the details out here and save yourself having to cut and paste witty remarks into multiple missives?

[PSlaven]

Congrats, big guy!

[Luther Blissett]

Here's my brilliant dissertation completion story. After hauling my ass four hours back to Penn, spending untold amounts of cash on quality paper and printer cartridges, and adhering to countless, arcane rules on page setup, I turned in the dissertation and it was prompty filed away. Hooray, I thought. That was too easy. The Margin Lady didn't hit me with a ruler or anything.

An hour later, eating lunch with one of my advisors, I realized I forgot to add a really, really important footnote the night before. (The dangers of getting drunk on sidebars and celebrating prematurely.)

So now my dissertation is available to the world (or that small portion of the world with access to Dissertation Abstracts), with a great gaping flaw in it. (Besides all the sundry other flaws I'm too anxious to go a-searching for.)

[JPool]

You give hope to us all.
Congrats!

[The Constructivist]

Heh, you should see mine. No, wait, don't. Those bolded, bracketed final revision instructions to self that I missed in the rush to get the damn thing printed out were not my attempt to imitate Hawthorne's "editor's" footnotes in "Chiefly About War Matters." I swear.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I was once hanging out in the astrophysics lounge (a place where I did a lot of sleeping, if I remember rightly) and found an old copy of someone's dissertation. "Well," I thought, "I'll read this and thereby honor the work of this bygone student, whose dissertation probably has never been read by more than ten people." But after the first page or so, that just led to more sleeping.

[Shahar Ozeri]

Congratulations.

Finishing, revising and defending was much less of an ordeal (and honestly, quite anti-climactic)than getting into more than a few scuffles with the Dissertation Formatting Nazis. I remember thinking that maybe it just might have been easier to get an id card in Stalinist Russia than turn in a properly formatted dissertation.

[phoenix complex]

(The dangers of getting drunk on sidebars and celebrating prematurely.)

Wait... do you mean "sidecars"? Or do dissertators get drunk on sidebars? Or is there another meaning?

And Scott -- you're really done? Congratulations! How long do you think it will take to sink in?

[Naadir Jeewa]

Congratulations Scott!

[CR]

To make me feel better about my work.

Hmmm. You downloaded mine, didn't you....

[Luther Blissett]

Phoenix: yes, sidecars. Clearly, I was so drunk that I didn't even remember the name of the drink I was drinking. (The Sidecar Lounge in Philly does a *really* great sidecar.)

[Walter Wadiak]

Yay Scott!!!

[Rich Puchalsky]

Note that Scott didn't actually write that he was finished.

[JPECK]

Congrats Scott!!!

[j.s. nelson]

I was wondering about that too...

[SEK]

I appreciate the many congratulations, but hold off on them a while. I am not the done one. The person who wrote what I clipped is. I suppose Luther's correct: I have become a little inscrutable lately. All I meant by the title was to refer to the unnecessary exclamation point in the clipped text. Its author was so enthused that s/he was to finish the dissertation in the year in which a third of Looking Backward takes place that she slapped a charming, it excessive, bracketed clause in his or her dissertation.

Not that I won't be done soon, mind you. I'm about to turn in 150 finishedish pages, then clean up the introduction and spit-shine the Twain and I'll be golden.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I was right. Scott will never really be done.

[SEK]

You are right, but you will be wrong. (And soon!)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Even now the genetically engineered dog is being given the last growth supplements and neural implants that will permit it to not only devour any paper copies of Scott's diss but also EMP any computer files as well.

[JPool]

I didn't think that you were done done (though I don't really see how you could miss that that was the impression the title would give). Still turning in four out of five completed and revised chapter is a substancial achievement in its own right.
Just watch out for dogs.