Fruition

I've been through all of this before: the defense, the last minute edits (which became an entire redo and rewrite of the stats for my second feeding trial), collecting signatures on forms, running around campus from one building to another. It was almost anticlimactic on Monday when I clicked the "submit" button to send a digital copy of my thesis to the grad school's website.

For some reason, none of that got me as nearly excited as when I picked up the three printed copies of my thesis from the library today. Why three? My advisor gets one, I get one, and the company that provided my scholarship money for the past year wants one. In the best of all possible outcomes, that company will also pay to have all those copies bound nicely in faux leather. Printing the thesis cost nothing; it is a service provided by the university. 

Theses and dissertations have signature pages. In this modern digital world, the signature pages are left blank on the official copy that I submitted to the grad school. But for those bound copies, well, I need signatures!

Here's a picture of me and the department head. Today was the end-of-term department party so I hunted him down, handed him a black pen, and said, let's get this done!

I am so excited! I am very proud of my "little" MS thesis (only 204 pages--I just checked my dissertation: it clocked in at 215 pages, thank dog).

Somehow, I managed in two years to take the classes I needed to apply to vet school, complete classes and research for a master's degree, and get accepted into vet school. That's some pretty serious long-range planning come to fruition.