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Alright, so my work isn't done and, while nobody's more aware of it than I am, finishing the draft cleared up a tremendous amount of the pressure and brain fog that surrounds this particular high-pressure environment.
I actually can't determine if my chair thinks much of my writing, to be honest. I've gotten some feedback which indicates she literally doesn't understand rudimentary terms or themes from my subject, creating bad feedback moments, and some legitimately useful feedback, so it's something of a mixed bag. Wherever I can determine she doesn't know the subject, I can either clear it up or just leave it - I can just cover it during the thesis defense. I did leave an email asking for broad strokes opinions or guesses about how she feels my writing works as a whole and how she expects the final weeks to progress; will I have trouble? Does my work look dangerously incomplete?
You know, clearly I hope for good news on that front. My chair is the one person who's given me the most dramatic and negative feedback of any professor I've worked with, and I intentionally selected her because I thought she'd be, first, familiar with this shit and, second, the most likely to help me fill in reading and theory gaps. Neither of those things really proved to be the case, she would take a week even to indicate she'd gotten an email from me, was difficult to wrangle on campus (often responding to a week-old email suddenly to tell me she'd be on campus for a two-hour window that morning when I live an hour away), would often recommend books or literature that were wildly out of place, and didn't want to sound off on notes or drafting progress, telling me to just send it to her when I had the work complete.
So, I'm like... I'm very tired.
I can't really wrap my head around being done with this - the editing is important and busy-inducing, but it's just not the same. Like, whatever I don't get done in terms of cleaning up my writing just doesn't get done, but the bulk of it's there and I think meaning can generally be extrapolated from the 82 pages of literary theory I typed out. Like, you can bust me for making a leap from place to place because I had to cut out all of the pieces that allowed someone to make a connection between two thoughts, or you could bust me for slopplier-than-usual writing (which I've been informed is generally air-tight, so a little looser than normal is probably still pretty strong), but you probably can't bust me for being outright wrong.
Good news is pretty good. Kay got a new job, starting... I don't know, like next week, I think. I'm hazy on time frames. It pays 50% more than this job, 40 hours a week, normal work hours (8-4), benefits, paid holidays off (which is nice, because that kicks in right away). There's overtime right away, but that's good. Because Kay's shifts tend to be 10-11 hours right now, then communiting almost as far as this place back and forth, the longer drive probably won't register as anything particularly bad and the actual time on site is less. Kay's got a good idea of the working environment because a few friends have been working their for a while, and the diagnosis is that the job is a bit ass but the work environment is strong.
That's genuinely hope-inducing. So there's that and whatever else I'll be able to find, which could be anything from contracted tech support gigs to teaching. I'm hoping to land a creative writing position very nearby for the semester, but that's really up in the air. You'll only hear more about that if it happens.
I'm not free of this yet, but the hardest work is done. I've had friends tell me they're nervous about their defenses, but I'm really not. I could talk about this thesis for hours, I feel the writing is at least okay, and I've done a tremendous amount of research. Whatever it's worth, I do like and respect my committee, so I feel good sitting down with them and defending my work.
So, okay, alright. Fine - let's move on from this point.
I actually can't determine if my chair thinks much of my writing, to be honest. I've gotten some feedback which indicates she literally doesn't understand rudimentary terms or themes from my subject, creating bad feedback moments, and some legitimately useful feedback, so it's something of a mixed bag. Wherever I can determine she doesn't know the subject, I can either clear it up or just leave it - I can just cover it during the thesis defense. I did leave an email asking for broad strokes opinions or guesses about how she feels my writing works as a whole and how she expects the final weeks to progress; will I have trouble? Does my work look dangerously incomplete?
You know, clearly I hope for good news on that front. My chair is the one person who's given me the most dramatic and negative feedback of any professor I've worked with, and I intentionally selected her because I thought she'd be, first, familiar with this shit and, second, the most likely to help me fill in reading and theory gaps. Neither of those things really proved to be the case, she would take a week even to indicate she'd gotten an email from me, was difficult to wrangle on campus (often responding to a week-old email suddenly to tell me she'd be on campus for a two-hour window that morning when I live an hour away), would often recommend books or literature that were wildly out of place, and didn't want to sound off on notes or drafting progress, telling me to just send it to her when I had the work complete.
So, I'm like... I'm very tired.
I can't really wrap my head around being done with this - the editing is important and busy-inducing, but it's just not the same. Like, whatever I don't get done in terms of cleaning up my writing just doesn't get done, but the bulk of it's there and I think meaning can generally be extrapolated from the 82 pages of literary theory I typed out. Like, you can bust me for making a leap from place to place because I had to cut out all of the pieces that allowed someone to make a connection between two thoughts, or you could bust me for slopplier-than-usual writing (which I've been informed is generally air-tight, so a little looser than normal is probably still pretty strong), but you probably can't bust me for being outright wrong.
Good news is pretty good. Kay got a new job, starting... I don't know, like next week, I think. I'm hazy on time frames. It pays 50% more than this job, 40 hours a week, normal work hours (8-4), benefits, paid holidays off (which is nice, because that kicks in right away). There's overtime right away, but that's good. Because Kay's shifts tend to be 10-11 hours right now, then communiting almost as far as this place back and forth, the longer drive probably won't register as anything particularly bad and the actual time on site is less. Kay's got a good idea of the working environment because a few friends have been working their for a while, and the diagnosis is that the job is a bit ass but the work environment is strong.
That's genuinely hope-inducing. So there's that and whatever else I'll be able to find, which could be anything from contracted tech support gigs to teaching. I'm hoping to land a creative writing position very nearby for the semester, but that's really up in the air. You'll only hear more about that if it happens.
I'm not free of this yet, but the hardest work is done. I've had friends tell me they're nervous about their defenses, but I'm really not. I could talk about this thesis for hours, I feel the writing is at least okay, and I've done a tremendous amount of research. Whatever it's worth, I do like and respect my committee, so I feel good sitting down with them and defending my work.
So, okay, alright. Fine - let's move on from this point.