May 31, 2008

Idling on empty

Oh, thesis writing! How you vex me! I have started into the “Results” section of my dissertation, and while significantly easier to write than the introduction, it has its own set of problems. Namely, mind-numbing boredom. I can't in good faith expect anyone to read through this drivel when I myself can barely stand writing it. I'm in luck on that point; a recent trip to the library showed me that no one checks out the theses there. Half the people who have graduated don't even have a bound copy of their dissertation on display. A student's committee are meant to read their thesis thoroughly, but having read a former lab mate's missive, I am reasonably sure that his mentors didn't quite make it to the first sentence of his introduction. The scientist in me wants to run a little experiment and see whether anyone would notice if I wrote the first and last paragraphs of every chapter, and then filled the rest with cut 'n' pasted online chapters of the bible. The big drawback there would be that a positive result for that attention assay would be my failing my PhD. I think the best course of action would be to write this thing to the best of my ability, until I come up with a good piece of rationalization in favour of blowing it off… I’ll field suggestions on that one by the way. For my downtime, I recently rediscovered Lost in OC, which I found in a free paper when I lived in Huntington Beach. Very entertaining!

1 comment:

P said...

Let's see... MT read it over JW's shoulder while she was editing. MAM stopped corrections on page 15. And CDS clearly didn't get to chapter 6 (or else she would have noticed obvious holes in my work, seeing that she studies that sort of thing). So, no. I don't think anyone will read it. :P

10 Things in 1000 days

I decided to rationalize my impulse purchasing of knitting books by setting myself a personal challenge.
Here's how long I have left:

Is There Anybody Out There?

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