I have decided to blog my ongoing work on my MA thesis. As with most graduate students, I'm sure, the whole thing is taking much longer than expected.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

3 hours of printing!

Can you believe it took me 3 hours to print and assemble my 4 copies of my 100-page thesis!

I was hoping of handing it in today but seeing how long it took to print, not to mention that the department's secretary closes at 4 and it takes 30 to 60 minutes to get to school; I'll bring them in first thing tomorrow morning. Plus all my other errands, like bringing my library books back. I feel like I've revised this thing to death! And Anne and Gail Scott have been very useful with some last minute info. So fun to have writers alive around you with internet connection! :-)

My meeting with Andrew and Lianne went well. They had some things to point out and Lianne had corrected my intro and conclusion. Lianne sent me an extremely flattering email last night in which she says that I should feel good about my thesis because it is very good. That brought tears to my eyes. It's funny because such a compliment will affect me, and then I'll kind of go numb. I haven't yet realized that I'm finished, I suppose.

I chatted a long while with Andrew, a lot about US Universities I might want to apply to for my PhD. He was bringing up, other than U of Chicago and Duke, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and North Western. Those types, the ones you hear about in movies but would never actually ever have the pretension of thinking that you might be a student there. So I asked him if he really thought I stood a chance applying to these top-notch schools and he answered yes. If I have well enough grades and good GRE scores (he seemed confident of my thesis & my letters of reference, which is good because he'll de asked to write one!), it might be easy for me to get in. Plus, administration might play on my team. Since 9/11, the US has been very strict in giving out student visas, especially to Arab countries. Meanwhile, Universities have international student quotas to fill. As a Canadian, I would be a good "safe" international student candidate. Plus my French name sounds foreign. So my ugly French Québécois name and US (over-)protectionism might just play in my favor. Sucks for Arabs though, and goes to show how the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Anyway, all that to say that this blog may never end because it might very well become the never-ending doctoral thesis! :-)

Now, I'm tired again. And I'm hoping that Anik will be able to give me another acupuncture treatment because my right arm has started hurting a bit again.

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