Writing a thesis: An experience of humility, perseverance, and determination

Ever since I defended my thesis last week, several friends have asked me, "so how does it feel to be done with your masters degree?"  First, to clarify one thing, I am not done with my masters.  I'm done with my thesis, which is only 1/3 of my masters program.  And it makes sense that people associate defending a thesis with being done with the whole program.  This is because most graduate students leave their thesis for last.  Well, I ended up being a freakishly proactive over-achiever and I finished my thesis in my first year of graduate school.  Now, before you say, "wow, that's impressive," let me tell you about how challenging that was...and maybe you'll have some pity on me.

I feel that this accurately describes how I often felt writing a thesis.  It's a somewhat vulnerable experience as your writing goes through dozens of rounds of revisions...often concluding with your adviser saying, "I just went ahead and changed some things for you." (at which point I would think to myself: Thank you!!!) Writing a thesis in my first year of grad school meant doing all of the research and writing of my thesis while taking a full load of classes, meeting with three clients each semester, and working as a TA.  Thankfully, I learned some valuable lessons along the way that I didn't necessarily expect.  Here are just a few:

• I learned more about how to be a good writer by writing a thesis than all of the English classes I've ever taken, combined.  In no other class did I get to work one-on-one with a professor to go through 50 or so drafts of a paper.  Those 50 drafts taught me a lot about reading and writing with a critical eye for clarity, organization, and word choice.
• This may be a little obvious, but I learned a good lesson in delayed gratification.  I have no clue how many hours I spent writing, meeting with research participants, or analyzing data in the lab late at night.  But each one of those hours put me one step closer to completion.  And there were times when it was hard to see that light at the end of the tunnel.  
• When you work on research, you aren't working independently in a vacuum.  You depend on other people.  Your goals and timelines might not work out, and not because you didn't try hard, but because research is never a perfect process.  Sometimes I had to learn to say "it'll be ok, I'm not going to worry about factors I can't control."
• Heavenly Father is in the details of our lives.  Towards the end of the study, I was waiting for a computer programmer to finish tweaking a MATLAB program for us to analyze the data.  This was being delayed as the programmer kept running into bugs.  I personally know nothing about MATLAB, and so I felt helpless.  After 4-5 weeks of delays, I finally mustered the humility to acknowledge that Heavenly Father could help to get this analysis program working.  I even had the faith to ask Him to get it working the very next day.  The next afternoon, I received an email from my adviser saying that the bugs had been resolved, and the program was ready for a test run.  What a blessing and answer to prayer.  I certainly never thought that writing a thesis could prove to be a builder of faith.  

So those are a few of my lessons learned.  If it wasn't a requirement for me to write a thesis, there is no way on earth I would have ever done it.  But it's an experience I am grateful for.  

The department secretary makes these mini posters
 to advertise for every thesis defense.
I kept mine as a souvenir. :)

p.s. For those who may appreciate it, I wrote the title of this post in APA format.  I couldn't help myself.