Thesis nightmares, real and imagined...

Fueled partly by my stress from writing my thesis, and partly by reading the comments in this post at Michael Bérubé’s website, I had a whopper of a thesis defense dream last night. In it, I was at my thesis defense, which (of course) was taking place on the front lawn of the house I grew up in. My committee was all there, camped out in lawn chairs, as were several other hangers-on (family members, friends from different times in my life, fictional characters, that sort of thing). I was holding court in front of the plum tree, which somehow was an adequate backdrop to project powerpoint slides onto. The talk was going pretty well, but it was running a little long, so the chair of my committee recommended taking a quick break so that everyone could grab more coffee. And then... my entire committee used the opportunity to ditch me. They just snuck off and went home. I spent the rest of my dream trying to track them down, so I could force them to listen to the rest of my talk and sign my thesis, but to no avail. The whole time this was going on I was trying to decipher if the mass exodus meant that I automatically passed, or automatically failed. I still haven’t figured it out.

I’ve never had a dream like this before, so I’m going to blame all the commenters on Prof. Bérubé’s site, who described their nightmares about teaching classes where students just got up and left in the middle of class. Clearly I’m very suggestible right now. Also, the stress from trying to finish up is getting to me. It feels like I have a very finite amount of work left to do (which, I suppose, is true), and that every minute I spend doing something else is time that is added on to the end of my tenure in graduate school. Which is making it sort of difficult for me to relax, or even, y’know, sleep.

I’m trying very hard to pace myself and approach the whole thing rationally (I’m going to need to sleep between now and when I actually finish), but it’s proving to be a little difficult. The whole situation is made worse by the fact that writing is really hard while I’m in the lab, since everyone seems to gravitate toward me whenever they have a question about anything. I tried to fend people off with the following hastily made-up sign:



Care to guess how effective that was at getting people to leave me alone? Even people who wouldn’t normally talk to me started staring at me like I was a zoo exhibit. Standing in front of me smirking until I looked up at them. On the upside, I’ve gotten plenty of commiseration from people who have completed their degrees and know what it’s like. On the downside: I. CAN’T. GET. ANY. WRITING. DONE.

If any of you have any great suggestions for how to get people to leave me alone in the lab so I can work, I’d love to hear them. Please don’t suggest not showering for extended periods of time though. It’s MIT. I’m not sure anyone would even notice.

CITC Website update: My meta tags have significantly improved the site's ranking in Google for a lot of search terms. I'm probably not going to be able to make much more progress on this until we get rid of the ghastly frames that are currently being employed on the site. Unfortunately, I'm still having no luck with the Jake Kennedy search string (although my blog post on the topic now comes in at number 10 in the search – ha!). If anyone has an indexed website and is willing to help me out, I’d appreciate it. (If you’re willing to help, but have no idea what I’m talking about, e-mail me, and I’ll clue you in).