Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Thesis

Here are the numbers:
  • 223 pages, 27 pages of front matter and 196 of text
  • 9 chapters
  • 29 figures
  • 39 tables
  • 122 references
Yep, that's my master's thesis. It's a rather substantial document. Turns out that I had a lot to say about feeding broiler chickens whole flax seed and carbohydrase enzymes. 

I officially entered the graduate program a year ago. I conducted the feeding trials during May through July and spent all of August and September in the lab. I collected and read most of the references during the summer and fall. We ran all the statistical analyses in the fall. I wrote the thing during the winter break (I spent the last three weeks of December doing nothing but writing). My advisor and I have been working on the edits for most of this winter term. During the coming spring term I have to prepare a talk and a poster for the national Poultry Science Association meeting that I will attend in July (we got ambitious and submitted two abstracts), and draft at least one paper that will be submitted for publication. Along with all of this, I've had to complete over 33 credit hours of graduate coursework and that doesn't include any of my French classes.

But we are at last done with the thesis. Or rather, she is finally ready for me to release it to the rest of my committee. I told her she didn't leave much for them to do. She mumbled something about always checking things that go out under her name. She did more than check, she pulled a damned nit comb through it. We both found errors that required re-runs of some statistics, and she reined in the worst of my florid writing and arm-waving pronouncements.

In case you care, the title of my thesis is "Enzyme supplementation of broiler chicken diets containing whole flax seed as a means to increase n-3 fatty acids in human diets".

The thesis defense is scheduled for May 12, Tuesday, at 8:30am. That will give me time to make final changes to it and get all forms submitted to the Graduate School in time to meet the June graduation deadline.
 

Then I can add a couple more letters after my name. Not that I used the ones I already have, but it's the thought that counts. 

2 comments:

Oldgraymare said...

So glad you're in the final run on the thesis. Was amazed that I actually understood the title. Following your blog on the chicken project really paid off. Good luck with the committee.

Rover Mom said...

Congratulations!