Here is the finished product:

And part of my official letter from the university confirming that I’m really finished:

I have no plans to change the name of my blog just yet though.  There’s still plenty of procrastination to be done, even if it’s not specifically thesis procrastination.   Suggestions for a new title welcomed.

I can’t believe it has been over two months since I last posted. Naughty me.

Well, here’s my list of excuses:

I’ve been redeveloping both of my courses this semester. My windows applications development course has changed from VB, Windows Forms 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0 to C#, WPF and the entity framework. That’s a lot of new stuff for me to master. Also, my web applications development course has been upgraded to include more web design content and also to use the ASP.NET entity framework.

I’ve started writing not one, but two textbooks – one for each of the courses I teach. They’ve both got about 10 chapters each so far. I’ve been giving them out to the students as notes as I finish each chapter.

I’ve been helping to organize a conference, which turns out to me more work than I thought it was going to be.

I’ve been working on getting some conference papers submitted, and have more upcoming deadlines for that.

I’ve been invited onto the curriculum committee in my department, and we are reviewing and revising our entire curriculum, which is a lot of work

I’ve been taking introductory spanish classes.
I’ve been doing social stuff, like inviting people over and going to hens nights and weddings and suchlike.

And, saving the best for last, I submitted my thesis! I handed it in to the graduate center on Thursday morning. It has now been sent out to the (anonymous) examiners, and I’ll get called in for the oral examination in July. Until then, I don’t have to worry about it at all!

I’m sure I’ll find plenty of other things to procrastinate about now though, starting with the conference paper I have to submit in two weeks.

Well, it sure has been a long time since I last posted.  This time I have not one excuse, but many:

1. Exam marking.  I spent most of the first part of November eyeballs deep in marking and grading.
2. Finishing my thesis.  The last part of November and the first two weeks of December were devoted to thesis work.  I wrote one third of my thesis in that two week period and submitted it to my supervisor on December 15th.  There are still one or two rounds of revision before I formally submit, but it’s essentially done.
3. Moving house.  As most of you would have gathered from Stephen’s blog post, I moved into a new apartment on December 16th.  It took a while to get everything sorted, with furniture to come from my brother’s place, some stuff from Waiheke and having to buy some new furniture.  
4. Christmas & New Year.  I spent a few days unplugged over on Waiheke for Christmas, and then got stuck into prepping for a series of New Year parties.
5. Playing games, reading books, watching TV and other normal time-wasters.  Having given up an awful lot of leisure activities in order to spend time on my thesis, now that it is over I have been indulging.  Been watching a Burn Notice marathon, reading books and playing GTA: Vice City Stories.

Sometime this week or next, my supervisor should be getting back to me with suggestions for rewriting and revising my thesis.  I will then have something to procrastinate and regular blog posts should resume.

Some people have been complaining about the lack of posts on this blog. This blog is called Thesis Procrastination, and the simple reason is that I’m not procrastinating at the moment, I’m trying to get the damn thing finished.

Until I do, sorry, you’ll have to make do with old YouTube videos and the (hopefully) steadily increasing word count in the sidebar.

When I return (hopefully very soon) I promise new cocktails, new stories of student stupidity and lots of posts about my new hobby.

Of enrolling in a PhD that is.  

I accept your congratulations on my 5 solid years of thesis procrastination.   On the bright side, I only have 3 more years to go.

I think I’ll go home early and drown my sorrows. 

Encounter 1:

I was walking back to my office and heard this deep voice behind me say ‘thesis thesis’, and when I turned around, there was nobody there.   My supervisor had evidently ducked into an office./p>

Encounter 2:

I was standing in the corridor talking to a couple of colleagues when my supervisor walked past in a rush and asked ‘Sarah, what are the three magic letters?’ /p>

My colleagues looked at me bemused as I called to his now disappearing back, ‘P H D?’.    ‘Exactly’, came the faint reply from down the stairs./p>

[And isn't it telling that I don't actually have a category related to my PhD on this site?]

Back in 2001, there were several procrastinating students working on our BCom Honours dissertations. To relieve some of our tension, we began to send each other emails with snippets of poetry about the dissertation writing process. Between myself, Geoff and Smrithi (aka Smooch), we ended up with 38 separate poems, mostly single-verse limericks, but some longer and other formats.

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