Thesis: The Mechanisms of Student Fear

I just hit the "send" button on what I hope will be the accepted draft of my master's thesis.

This thesis has felt doomed from the get-go. It was supposed to be done last semester, December of 2008. In November, I had to put my beloved dachshund, best friend of 14 years, to sleep, which brought all motivation for anything to a grinding halt. If I had trouble convincing myself to shower in the mornings, convincing myself to finish my thesis was not going to happen.

Thank goodness for foresight, right? That's precisely why I signed up to take the thesis course one semester prior to when I would really, truly, honest-to-God need to be finished with it. Our educational system is all about educating one to their own pitfalls - mine being procrastination.

I've been working full-time, keeping up my beautiful house, keeping my sanity, and plugging away at the thesis, "What Makes College Students Pay Attention?" Needless to say, I don't much care anymore what makes college students pay attention.

I gave myself a deadline - I need to have it in the professor's inbox by Monday morning, 4/13. Grades are probably due by 5/1, and I still need my thesis approved by the committee, and I need to do my oral presentation of my thesis to the committee...graduation is in three weeks! What if this draft isn't accepted?

Pushing my panic aside, I settled in this Saturday evening to finish it, once and for all. I picked my laptop cord off of the floor and plugged it in.

It popped and sparked a flourescent blue that had me blessing my house's concrete, and not carpeted, floors. Most concernedly, the blue flash didn't occur at the plug, but rather in the middle of the cord.

I carefully unplugged it. Once disconnected, it popped again. I left it on the floor for several minutes, hoping the charge would somehow drain from the cord before I handled it again.

The cord was nearly severed in several places. "What the..." I looked closer. The severing had suspicious-looking teeth marks...

"ELEANOR ROOSEVELT!!!"

Ellie poked her head from behind the sofa. I sighed, knowing it was my own fault for leaving anything inside my house that I didn't want chewed up.

I called my parents. "Do you have any electrical tape?" Doug asked. "I think so," I answered.

I taped up my cord as best as I could, and got to work. Several hours later, I had yet to catch fire, so that was a good sign.

After hitting the "send" button, I expected to feel a huge relief, perhaps even a sense of accomplishment. I just finished the requirements for a master's degree!

But what if it doesn't get accepted? My grandpa is coming up from California for this graduation, and I can sustain a lot of embarrassment - I can go through a whole day of school with a cat's hair ball stuck to my rear, I can hideously misspeak and announce to my coworkers that I'm exiting for the bathroom "because this is going to take awhile," (when I meant the patient file I was working on would take awhile, not the trip to the restroom)....but I don't think I can withstand the embarrassment Grandpa coming to see me graduate and I fail.