Dissertation Finito!

It's finished! Yes, after long hours of blood, sweat, PubMed downtime, MS Word crashes, MS Word layout fuckups, hungover practice presentations and tears, my dissertation is finally finished! I took it in to get it bound the other day, and (rather begrudgingly) handed it in. After all the aggro surrounding it, it was a bit of an anti-climax when the guy at the undergrad office simply said "thanks, sign here please..." and that was it. 70% of my Research Project module was disappearing before my eyes, to appear on some random tutors desk for them to (metaphorically) tear to pieces. Another 20% was a simple mark awarded based on how our supervisors think we did, effort-wise. Easy. However, the last 10% was the most dreaded part....the presentation.

I already had done a practice run through with my supervisor, which I stupidly attempted hungover, and it wasn't really a good preparation for the main thing. The basic setup was that I had to do a 10 minute presentation on my dissertation to an audience of other students, along with 2 academic members of staff, with 5 minutes of questions after it.

The presentation was fine, far better than I expected! The questions started off ok...the student questions were fine, managed to brave one half of the staff's questions... then came the second member of staff, who basically used me as a scratching post. She just would not let this drop! It was clear from her questions that she basically thought my alternative model was a load of shit, and she would come out with question after question until one of them would trip me up. In the end, after the question time going up to almost 10 minutes (which I deemed pretty unfair seeing as most others got 5 questions tops), she came out with a couple that I couldn't answer. She got me. It's a shame, because it all went well up to that point, I just hope I won't get harshly marked for it.

So now, 100% of the module is done...which means, one more exam and then I'm DONE! I can't wait, it's flown so much, and I'm 50/50 as to whether I'm sad or glad to be graduating. I do sort of wish I had used the time more wisely, got a bit more involved at Uni, but I guess that's a lesson learned for my next degree.