The master thesis is done!

[whereisirisnow]

It is done! I have done it! Last week I handed in the report of my thesis, I gave my final presentation on Monday and yesterday I received my grade. It is an 8.4/10 *yay*. This means that I will graduate cum laude for my master (which I also did for my bachelor). Also, I finished this degree in 1.5 years, even though it is a 2-year program. Also also, my average grade is an 8.64/10. I am very pleased!

I celebrated this with my family by eating a 'bossche bol' (you can google that ;) ) and they got me a lovely bracelet as a present for this achievement. A picture of this bracelet will follow, as soon as it is properly engraved. I've also been celebrating this by doing mostly nothing science-related for the past few days, even though I had to write part of a second draft for our Alpbach-paper (which is happening! Excited!). Oh well, tomorrow is another day, another chance.. :)

Comments

[cmcmck]

Congratulations :o)

I know how that feels- my own MA is in early modern history.

[whereisirisnow]

Thank you! Oh, a MA in early modern history sounds very interesting indeed!

[nanila]

Woooo, congratulations! And what a fantastic mark, especially for an early finish!

[whereisirisnow]

Thanks! The early finish was mainly due to me not having any summer holidays last year. Instead I did the summer school in Alpbach and a kind of internshipin Norway and a conference in Germany. Busy, but fun summer, which resulted in the early finish! Lucky too, as it may otherwise not have been possible to start my PhD.

[sorrillia]

Congrats! I hope I'll manage to finish my Master's thesis in the next month or so, but even if I do, it'll have taken me six years...

[whereisirisnow]

Thank you! Good luck with yours! You'll get there! What topic are you studying?

[sorrillia]

Thank you! I'm writing a Master's thesis to escape from a doomed PhD program in physical chemistry. I've been there six years (this is the US, where PhD programs don't really have a time limit other than your advisor's patience) fighting with broken equipment and getting nowhere with it, which means I don't actually have any real data. 150 pages of my 250 page thesis are a user manual I've been writing for the undocumented homebuilt ultra-high vacuum molecular beam scattering system I've been trying to repair, so arguably that's the real topic of my thesis. The rest of it talks about why O_2 reacts with Si surfaces even though it's spin-forbidden and about why XeF_2 etches Si surfaces while F_2 doesn't.

[whereisirisnow]

That sounds very frustrating! Good luck with that! You sure have a way bigger thesis than I do, as mine is only 29 pages long (which is considered a normal to big report). It sounds really interesting (although my chemistry does need a bit of brushing up).

Do you know what you would like to do after your master?

[sorrillia]

Thanks! It is pretty frustrating, and is in large part for the depression evident in my posts here. (This blog mostly only gets used for posts I don't want the whole internet to see. I have a more frequently updated Wordpress blog that has a Dreamwidth feed at http://amiablebowfin-feed.dreamwidth.org/ thanks to kaberett. I should probably write up a more detailed explanation-for-non-chemists of what I've been doing for the last six years and post it there at some point.)

Yeah, this is pretty unreasonable for a Master's thesis: the last student to get a PhD in my lab had a PhD thesis that was only 180 pages long. I think that part of it is that Master's theses in chemistry are really rare in the US---no one gets a Master's degree unless they're dropping out of a PhD program---so there isn't really a standard for them, and my advisor just defaults to expecting the same length she'd expect for a PhD student, except without publishable results.

As for what I want to do after my Master's, "have a full-time job that comes with health care" would be my goal. (At the moment I qualify for poverty healthcare, but it won't pay for transgender expenses, and if I make enough to pay my rent and food costs I won't qualify for it anymore.) Honestly, I think I'm too burnt out on research and on grad school to go back to another PhD program even if they'd have me: if I do so eventually, I'd probably want to do so in Europe, where I'm told they treat grad students much better, but I suspect that would be even harder to get into. Unfortunately, it's not clear to me that there are many jobs I'm qualified for: at present I've applied for adjunct teaching positions at local community colleges, but the fact I haven't heard back from them yet probably means that I won't. So I suspect I'm going to be trying to freelance tutor high school students and probably continue to be financially dependent on my parents and burning my savings for longer than I'm comfortable with.

[whereisirisnow]

Good luck finishing this bloody thesis. I'm sure it'll be like a weight lifted of your shoulders, when you finally hand in the thing (maybe quite literally as well, as a pile of 250 pages is quite heavy).

I've heard about the bad conditions for PhD students in America, and I can assure you that it is way, way better in Europe as far as I know. For starters, the health insurance is a mandatory insurance for which you pay monthly (reasonable priced). Besides that, depending on the country where you're doing your PhD, you are regarded as a full time employee, so you get a real, proper salary. That's the way it is in the Netherlands, anyway. In the UK you'll probably get paid through scholarships and funding and in Switzerland you get a very nice salary and you get to keep your student identification card, so you have the best of both worlds: loads of money like someone with a more mainstream job + lots of discounts, because you are a 'poor' student :p

[sorrillia]

Thanks! Hopefully I'll manage to get some progress made on it this weekend, since the last couple of days I didn't really get much done. And yeah, it will be heavy, especially since I have to submit two paper copies of it...

*nods* Yeah, Europe does sound like a very good option if one can manage to get into a program there. Honestly, though, I'm not that sure I want to stay in research: I've managed to get pretty badly burnt out, and I'm not sure I ever had the amount of passion for it that you are supposed to. I just don't see much else open in terms of career paths.

What about you? What do you plan on doing once you finish your PhD? Become a professor?

[whereisirisnow]

Yeah, research can be pretty tough. Very persistent to continue your thesis even after a burn out! At present, I still firmly believe I would like to follow the whole numerous-postdocs-before-ever-finding-a-permanent-job-to-become-a-professor-path, but I'm not ruling out ending up somewhere else. ESA sounds very cool for example :)

[sorrillia]

Good luck!

[yvi]

Congratulations!

[whereisirisnow]

Thank you!

[liv]

Congratulations! That's an amazing result, and the more so since you already have a PhD place lined up and a paper in draft. The celebrations sound very appropriate too.

[whereisirisnow]

Thank you! I am always in favour of celebrating stuff! :D

[ceb]

Well done you! You've earned the rest, try not to feel guilty ;-)

[whereisirisnow]

Thanks! I will take your advice: away with the guilt! :p

[lark_ascends]

That's fantastic!! Well done!!

[whereisirisnow]

Thank you! :)