As Briony alluded to, the final, not-going-to-tweak-this-bugger-any-more version of my thesis is printed, handed in, and forgotten about. Four copies had to be printed - doublespaced, ring bound, and sprayed with special pheromones to make the PhD assessors think they are poultry.

So I went on down to the graduate research school at UNSW, and I uprooted my thesis from its moorings, and hurled it across the desk into the willing arms of the PhD review machine. I filled in a little survey on my postgraduate life (What was your best experience? Worst? Discuss, with examples), and was promptly rewarded.

I received a box and a little congratulatory letter, wrapped up in a ribbon:



Inside the box, a little slice of flavoursome UNSW bling:



I plan to attach it to a huge gold chain and wear it around my neck at my graduation. That said, with bling in hand, I decided to pay homage to an old, old uni tradition.

You see, back in the halcyon days of being an undergraduate, we had this thing with exams. Our loosely knit group of friends (think of it more as a cardigan than a jumper), we'd turn up to an exam, and variously nervously twitch, scribble and fluster our way through it. About halfway though the exam, one of us would leave. This would prompt the rest of us to follow shortly thereafter, where we would congregate at the biggest dive that was nearby - in our case, invariably Mickey D's on Barker Street.

I exchanged some cash for a greasy apple pie from the equally greasy, spotty teenager behind the counter, and I wondered what he was going to write his PhD dissertation on. I munched on down on it, and realised the apple pies tasted better when they were made from chokos.

We're going to be moving in a few weeks, so now it's back to the unenviable task of re-packing all of our stuff into a small, small space. Luckily, I think I'll try to get a machine to do some of the work :P

Labels: nerd, PhD, photos