I’ve had a heckuva time with my Masters thesis, it’s all interdisciplinary and nice and stuff, meaning I couldn’t find a supervisor for donkey’s years. I finally found one (at a different university) and she’s awesome and amazing and my hero and all those wonderful things.
And now at long last I’m nearly finished the damn thing, I gave her a draft to look over (on time, which was already really late) and doesn’t she …
get cancer. I’m gutted, it’s pretty awful for her, she’s miserable and ill and waiting for surgery and stuff.
But my thesis isn’t getting read. We have already established that there’s nobody in my faculty who can really constructively comment on my topic, and my lovely supervisor is too sick to read it until the weekend, when I really need help right now.
I’m already taking far longer than I ever wanted to. I’ve had enough. I’m going mad ! Clearly I need guidance and I’m more than happy to take it but there’s no one to give it to me !
And I love my supervisor, she’s fantastic, and the last thing I want to do is barge into her sick bed and make her read my boring thesis. Way to give her delirium-induced nightmares.
The only other person who could help me is equally awesome but not well versed with my field; also she’s the assistant dean so she’s a bit busy too.
Sorry to hear about her and your troubles. While my wife was in Africa on research, her PhD supervisor died of a heart attack.
From her experiences as a professor now, I can tell you, they can really push through review of a masters thesis quickly if they want (I remember one where the whole committe did it in like a week). It rather sucks for the faculty, but they can do it in extreeme cases. Also since it is a masters, most of them in disciplines that you touch on, even though you’re interdisciplinary should be able to do it, even though they’re crabbing they can’t.
I don’t know what discussions you have had with your faculty, but I do know the old “it’s not really my field” is the #1 excuse for not wanting to read it. If it starts to be a problem with nobody helping, get your grad coordinator to kick some arse.
Um, do you happen to be in international development? My wife is interdisciplinary international development at a Canadian university. She might be able to help if that is what you do. I’m sure she won’t mind me volunteering her services!
Hey, weird ! It is (kind of) about international development ! (but all interdisciplinary-like …)
Which university does she teach at? And what did she do in Africa? I wanted to go that route but I couldn’t travel to do my research, so I tried postcolonialism instead. (Also, I was advised by my first (awful) advisor not to go to Africa because it was too dangerous. I then found out that a student of hers, a few years back, had gone to Africa to research and died there. Another reason why she was an awful supervisor. Not that I’m bitter.)
Thanks for the advice, I will get on the horn to nag my faculty immediately. This is causing me no end of grief. It’s really not the ‘review’ yet, I just need someone to look at my revisions and say either “Yes, good, more like that” or “No, it’s crap, start over.” I suppose it could only be good for me if I know more about my topic than my examiners …?
who’s on your committee? I’m at Cal. State, Northridge and have two other people who are on my committe who can comment intelligently on my thesis project. Do you have a similar arrangement?
Does your thesis need to be read and reviewed RIGHT NOW? Is some “avoid- at-all-cost” deadline looming over you that is completley unavoidable? Usually, nothing is set in stone and there are procedures for various emergencies that spring up. Talk to your grad advisor or the dept. chair about this.
If someone’s breathing down your neck about getting this finished, read 'em the riot act. Medical emergencies happen. Your supervisor is undergoing therapy for cancer, that’s a pretty good medical emergency. Talk to your grad. advisor or even the head of the dept. for help here and direction. As much as we’d like our graduate projects to go smoothly, life does have its own perverse sense of humor. Hopefully your dept. has procedures for such emergencies.
My faculty doesn’t work that way. We’re meant to be pretty self-directed. Which I guess seemed like a good idea at the time … But thanks for the tip, there is someone who’s helped me in the past and is somewhat tangentially informed of my topic.
Yes. It is many months past the date it was originally supposed to be due (my interdisciplinary and independent program does leave for a lot of flexibility in deadlines …), partly due to my endless supervisor/advisor problems, and partly due to my own idiocy. But now I am ready to do whatever it takes to get it done, including sacrificing small animals (not necessary yet) or staying up all night (nearly there), if only I could get some assistance.
Yep, they know me well already because of the aforementioned supervisor/advisor difficulties. At this point I know it’s not my fault, I know that it’s not a hopeless situation, it’s just that it’s taken so long to get to this point and I want to be FINISHED, dammit, and I can’t ! (Also if I finish soon enough I’ll get a bit of tuition refunded …)
I have a problem in the same vein, but much more on the petty side. Since I lost my job I decided to bite the debt bullet and get my masters is comp sci. I went to grad school once before, and flunked out miserably as a head case. This time I wanted to do it right, and have been working my ass off. I wanted to get a 4.0 to prove I could do it.
There is one class that is basically manditory. It is taught by the dean who is a really great guy. But in the middle of my class he had a severe heart attack and multiple bypass. The class is his baby, and he was too stubborn to step aside and let someone else take over. So he coninued to try to teach the class from the next weak , but was unable to give us much feedback. And this is a class that needs review and critque and modification to do the project right. Finally by the end someone else took over graded our projects. I and most everybody else in the class got b- to b+ for the class, becuase we basically had to turn in our first drafts. It is the only blemish on my 4.0 that I worked so hard for. I feel petty for bitching about it, and I don’t want to complain because there are a couple assholes gunning for the Deanship and I don’t want to give them ammo to get rid of the great guy.
I also am having a miserable time getting around to working on my thesis, Dammit Jim, I’m a computer geek not an author. But it is the only thing I have left to do.
I came from a department that was particularly multidisciplinary and from what I am hearing you say about your research topic, you may find someone on faculty there who could assist you…
Let me know if I can help point you in a specific way to some specific people…
Thanks for the offer, Elenfair! I sent you an e-mail but it bounced back.
My advisor is being less helpful than ever. She’s very happy that my supe read a draft, she doesn’t seem to realize that I need someone to read another draft … sigh …
And, in September, I got a thinly veiled dig from the Dean himself about how it’s taking me longer than it should to finish … well, Mr Dean, how 'bout some help now?
I soooo feel your pain. Completing my master’s thesis (also interdisciplinary: damn me for picking a goofy topic that nobody felt they were qualified to comment on!) encompassed several years, four rounds of leg surgery, a dead committee member, and much political maneuvering, including three retroactive extensions from the Dean of the Graduate School. Boy, was that fun.
Is your department chair on your side? Mine saved my life more times than I can count, and all I could do was bake cookies for him after the defense. A faculty mentor, even if it’s not one who knows anything about your topic, can be a huge help in navigating bureaucracy and notoriously quirky academic personalities.
Good luck, and remember, this too shall pass! (And you, too, shall pass!)
Best of luck to you. Even if you were already behind schedule, your current circumstances aren’t exactly within your control. I hope your advisor gets better soon. And don’t worry yourself too much - talking to those people you mentioned might relax you a bit at least, and if they can’t read it for you, they might be able to suggest people who could.
If it helps any (and it probably won’t, but my username should explain why I must share every anecdote that comes to my head), when I got my linguistics master, the administrative assistant at the dean’s office forgot to tell me that my defense was in two days, and not two weeks, as I had previously thought. I called her to verify the time, and she said “Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you - they decided to move everything up. Professor X is going out of town for the rest of the semester and all of next after the end of next week. Uh, so your defense is on Thursday.” I still got my thesis, but I almost burst a vein I was so mad at that lady for fogetting to tell me something like that. Grrr…
At the department where i’m doing my Ph.D, the turnaround time from handing in your Ph.D. dissertation to defending and passing is two weeks. Surely, in normal situations, reviewing a Master’s thesis should take less time, or at least no more.
It is for a Canadian thesis. I’d like to think it’s because ours are deeper than the American’s, they take longer to digest, but we’re probably just slower.
When I did my PhD, they made a stink cause I wanted a turnaround time of 4 weeks instead of the regular 6, due to an upcoming job. In the end I had to wait 6 weeks. For a masters here I think they like it around 4 weeks before defense.
Oh, God yes (in my experience, anyway). Sometimes my advisor would take several weeks, or in a couple of cases several months, even to tell me when he might get around to reading my draft, much less actually making comments and getting them back to me so I could edit. That was part of why the damn thing took me so long. (This applied both to the deceased advisor and his replacement.) How they thought I could edit without knowing what they thought I should change, I have no idea. This is where my department chair came in very, very handy: he could prod them into action much more diplomatically, yet more forcefully than I could.
I never did understand why it apparently took months to read a new draft of a 50-page paper you’ve already read. The again, when it came time to actually schedule the defense, I asked all my committee members for their schedules so I could coordinate. My chair gave me his schedule, and I proposed a few times. That was when my chair told me he’d neglected to mention an entire class he was teaching, which happened to rule out most of the times I’d already proposed (after the other, less flaky members had already responded). After that, I went directly to his department to get his schedule, and started copying my department chair on all e-mail correspondence. OK, I know I was no longer on campus to pester him by this point, but what the hell?
I almost had a heart attack when I drove down for my defense (250 miles), and was sitting in the defense room (the department library) waiting for the committee members to show up. It was just after spring finals, so campus was pretty deserted. I was trying to do some meditating so I wouldn’t freak out and start wheezing – I was so stressed out by that point that every time I either opened an e-mail from a committee member or opened my thesis file, I’d start having heart palpitations. Then my department chair came in and asked if I’d touched base in the last couple of days with my committee about the defense time, because a couple of them had called the department that morning to check the time. (I’d sent them at least a couple of confirmatory e-mails each in the previous week, asking if there was anything in particular they wanted me to address in my presentation. Nobody came up with anything, or even gave me any guidance as to format. I felt like I was twisting in the breeze.) Poor dept. chair: he knew how stressed out I was, so he started cracking jokes and decided to show me a new book in press by one of his former students, which happened to be a translation of Russian erotica. Took my mind off the plight of the North Caucasus for a minute, anyway…
I seriously think the whole defense, etc. is just an anthropological ritual they make you go through to be accepted into the tribe of Academia. Just try to keep that in mind. If they’ve gone as far as letting you schedule a defense, they’re planning on passing you. It’s Just A Ritual.
