An end to hoop-jumping

Just now, I got the email finally telling me that my thesis has been approved by a meeting of Academic Senate and I can finally graduate. No more hoops! This is the penultimate step in a long series of tiny achievements:

• Write final version of PhD thesis (the longest step!)
• Send thesis to supervisors (then deal with their comments - this can take months)
• Send thesis to School for a final pre-submission check (then deal with those comments)
• Send thesis off for examination by two experienced international researchers (ok, so one of them was from New Zealand - still counts!), wait for several months...
• Deal with those comments, send through to Head of School (along with evidence that I've actually dealt with those comments and not just ignored them)
• Get thesis approved by the Head of School (an important step - it means I never have to edit it again!)
• Make realllly sure that I haven't made any typos or formatting mistakes, then send thesis off to be bound in shiny pretty books
• Get books signed by the necessary people then give them to the Graduate Research Office

and, finally,

• Get my final thesis approved by the Senate and be placed in a graduation schedule.

So now all I have to do is wait for August 11th and graduate! As you can probably see, the main problem with getting a PhD accepted is that there are so many steps that you can never be sure when to go all out and celebrate - in a way, it sucks out a little of the joy because there's no single defined endpoint. Though doing a PhD certainly feels like doing a marathon, the analogy stops at the finishing line because instead of one big ribbon to run through at the end, there are a lot of little finish lines along the way! So I decided a while ago to save the biggest party for graduation day - the day I can finally call myself Doctor.