Friday, September 5, 2008

Dissertation Withdrawal

This nice lady asked me to meet up with her to discuss the stats part of her dissertation...

So I met up with her and, as I was going over the analysis section of her dissertation, I realized that she actually is all done with her dissertation and had submitted her final draft.

I looked at her and said....

"I just realized that you had not come to see me for statistics. You have come to see me because you are going through withdrawal.... Dissertation Withdrawal."

The matter of the fact is that...

This is something shared by many of us who had gone through the dissertation age.

It is a time when we feel obligatory to put off everything in our life for dissertation... otherwise, we feel so damn guilty about for no reason....

It is a time when even what we do have nothing to do with dissertation.... we are still working on our dissertation....

It is also a time when a whole lot of things we do for dissertation ended up having nothing to do with our dissertation or maybe the dissertation is actually the whole 9 yards not limited to that bounded print.

So we talked about different things... her topic, our experiences and a bit of statistics...

On our way home before we go our separate paths, I asked her...

"How does feel to be a doctor?"

"Nothing really." She replied.

"Isn't it funny that there is no fireworks and nothing explosive..." I said.

"I guess it is like getting out of a prolonged love and hate relationship..." Added I...

No one apparently had put it this way for her before... although she seems to find a sense of relief in it...

Then I thought... funny how a process so very alone brought us all to such commonality...

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