Writing a dissertation…
…is incredibly stressful.
I thought that the hardest part would be the actual writing bit. But I adjusted to that fairly well. I woke up every morning at 8am (not willingly, but because construction begins at 8am sharp right outside my front door), had two to three cups of coffee while I watched some tv show or another to wake up, then sat at my computer from about 9:30am until 5pm, almost everyday. And I wrote. Lots. And most of it was even decent.
On Monday I finally finished the actual writing bit, and that’s when I started to get stressed.
Why? Because I have a million little nit-picky things to do to the dissertation, in terms of editing, formatting, etc. And they all take a lot more time than they should. And to make matters worse, I took on the task of typing someone else’s dissertation for some extra cash. I finished typing it weeks ago, but he wants me to do the nit-picky things on his as well.
This afternoon I spent over 45 minutes trying to get a picture into a Word document. No matter what I did, the picture would not go anywhere but at the top of the page. In the end I had to get Kaitlyn, my Amazonian Webmistress, to fix it for me. Thank God. Because by that point I had thrown things around my apartment and slammed every door I could think of while swearing like a sailor at the construction workers outside (who couldn’t hear me, I promise… not so sure about my neighbours though…)
So, I guess writing a dissertation isn’t as stressful as polishing one up.
I should be all done next week. I hope. And then I promise I will come back from the blogcation of the last month or so.
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By Shaun Mcalister, August 12, 2010 @ 9:18 pm
I guess I’ll need more than two weeks off work to write mine then?
By Eleni, August 13, 2010 @ 12:38 am
Oh wow, that sounds really stressful. I know what you mean, though, how formatting things can take so much longer than they should. Good luck finishing it up, and I look forward to your return! :)
By Sebastian, August 15, 2010 @ 11:51 am
Gogo! I remember my dissertation… it was all very laid back and enjoyable — except for the appendices, which when you tallied in the unit testing and source code was about the same size as the dissertation itself…
re: Word — I vaguely recall right clicking the image and setting it to ‘float’, or ‘float above text’… or something like that.
Anyway, I hope you get through it all soon!