Steamed Puddings

My exam was today, and it went much better than I could have expected.

There are four possible outcomes for oral exams at my university:

• pass with no corrections required
• pass with minor corrections required
• revise and resubmit for another examination
• fail

95% of people I know pass with minor corrections required.  It is some kind of testament to my incredible perfectionism (bordering on OCD with this 250-page document, I swear) that I passed with no corrections required, a real rarity.  CSO even put my thesis forward as a nominee for the Best Doctoral Thesis award.  I had no idea I would do so well.  I hated the research, towards the end, and
I couldn’t see how anything positive could come of it.

The exam was…anticlimactic, really.  The chair was a female professor from the medical school who served to ensure the exam process was carried out as expected.  CSO was there as my supervisor (I enrolled in the old-school regulations which allow the supervisor to be an examiner; nowadays this isn’t permitted).  The oral examiner came over from Brisbane today and works in generally the same area as CSO.  It was his first oral exam, and I think he did a good job, though I had honestly expected to be grilled a bit more!  I was prepared for all sorts of nagging little questions about what the proteins I’d found actually meant, and we mostly stayed on the broad-strokes level (which was just fine with me as I’m a generalist, not a specialist).  And then it was all over!  I knew I would pass, but I didn’t have any clue that they thought it was SOOO good that I wouldn’t have to make any corrections at all.  I’m still astounded by that.

The path forward from here: tonight I’ll write the acknowledgements section, something I didn’t feel was necessary in the exam copies of the thesis.  (Honestly, if I had written it in February, I would have had some nasty things to say about supervisors, so it’s better that I write it now.)  Tomorrow I’ll fix a few typos in the thesis and start printing out the ~5 copies I’ll need to have hard-bound.  I’ll call around to some binders and get prices and estimated times.  I might even get to drop it off tomorrow.  Then comes the hardest decision: what color cover and printing should I get?  I kinda like the idea of red…

When I get the hard-bound copies back in less than a week, I can turn them in at the university’s Graduate Centre and get my letter stating that the PhD has been awarded.  I can trade this for some shiny gold rocks at my place of employment.

Graduation will be in September - and I have to get some papers out by then, if I want that Best Doctoral Thesis award.  Bring ‘em on!  Now that this is out of my life, I have time to work on papers again.