S. Worthen | Weblog

The day after I defended, I went over to SGS because I'd been informed that I would have paperwork to do there. It wasn't much, but it was important - a sheet wherein I committed to when I would be graduating and what my mailing address would be around that time. They also gave me the sheaf of papers which must be submitted along with the dissertation when it's turned in, including my assertion that I have permission to reproduce everything included in the dissertation. This is why I'm stripping out all the images for the final version.

SGS also gave me a sheet of paper telling me when my dissertation was due, a helpful thing since until then I didn't know if "a month of corrections" meant a calendar month or a month of business days. It's the latter, which, factoring in Christmas and New Year's, means my dissertation isn't ultimately due until nearly the end of January. But it sure couldn't hurt to have it in sooner, and I'll save on tuition if I do so.

Statistics Canada is also polling all PhD recipients at the moment. Giving me the questionnaire was part of the chair's duties. It's an extremely non-anonymous poll, asking for details like the title of my dissertation, what all my other degrees are, and how much I expect to earn by working in what sector in the coming year. But it's hard to be anonymous when the available data pool is so small.

It's all well and good to have corrections generously proofread on paper copies of my dissertation, but four copies of the thing adds up to a fair amount of weight. I went through two of them before we left, page by page, stripping out all pages with no marks on them and throwing them out. I probably saved a couple of pounds of luggage weight by doing so.

I find I'm being inconsistant on how I spell defence/defense. "Defense" is the U.S. spelling, "defence" is the British spelling, and offhand, I can't even tell you how it's spelled in the country where I'm earning this degree. (And I'm disoriented enough on this particular point of spelling that I erroneously swapped the two when initially posting this.)