It was only a matter of time before it happened. Dissertation writing has taken over my life. In fact, it is running my life. Whenever I am not writing, I am feeling guilty about not writing. And whenever I am writing, I am feeling guilty that I am not being more productive. And when I say “writing,” I mean squeezing in a couple of sentences between checking my 15 email accounts, reading blogs, and generally wasting time as only the internet can make possible.
I realized that I was a gonner during a fire alarm in my building today. There was huge beeping, blinding flashing, panic close at hand, and what did I grab in the few seconds I had before fire alarm-induced deafness set in? Not my wallet, not my house keys, not even my warm woolen mittens. Nope, I grabbed my laptop and ran down the stairs clutching it tightly to my chest. While at the moment nothing seemed more important to me than ensuring the well-being and safety of my laptop (and the dissertation within), reflection has revealed to me that perhaps the wallet would have been a good idea.
You’ll be happy to know that the building didn’t burn down (I think some toast met a fiery end in a microwave, setting off the fire detectors), we were let into the building after only a few minutes in the freezing cold – I didn’t even need to hide at a friend’s house until I was allowed access to my house keys (and beloved mittens!) again.
All is well that ends well. And it will end well on May 6. I hope.
Anna, you need to back-up your Thesis on an external hard disk!
8-}
Good luck, Massimo
Or use Google Documents.
Yeah, hope it goes well.
Good luck Anna! If I were you I’d so everything Massimo and Matt suggest above – and also ftp it to some personal webspace somewhere.
Having lost a good year’s work when my hard disk succumbed to an overload of dust in Ethiopia, I surely know how dissertation paranoia feels like. Towards the end of my dissertation writing two years ago, I had two copies of everything on my laptop, a copy and an incremental backup on an external hard disk, a prune and trim backup on the faculty network drive, a copy on my personal laptop and a few CD-ROMs. Agreed, a bit over the top, but better safe than sorry.
External back up? Absolutely.
A music based analogy but essentially, this applies to any data based work.
My portable digital recording workstation has a memory of about 1.4Gig (it’s 8 years old). After using over 70% memory, I bought an external back up drive.
Around the time it arrived, an offer came my way to work with a brilliant band and I recorded a 2 hour studio session with them. I exceeded the allocated memory and whilst the new session remained on the internal drive, I lost the previous two years worth of recordings.
If only I had backed up BEFORE this session !!!
Ok, y’all just made me completely paranoid – rightfully, of course. I have been emailing the dissertation to myself every couple of days. I now realize that I need to be far more systematic in my back-ups. Good thing my iPod’s hard drive is bigger than my laptop’s!
And thank you for the encouraging thoughts! I need as many of those as I can get.
You might not believe it, but you can turn off the wifi while working. All those pesky distractions magically go away. And definitely backup your paper and your data. Often. To different file names (add the date or a number to the name of the doc). In multiple places (an iPod and gmail is good). Particularly if you’re writing a large document in Microsoft Word. If you just copy dissertation.doc to a directory and it gets corrupted, and you copy it again before noticing, you’ve just destroyed your backup.
Turn off the wifi?? Come on now! It would be easier for me to chop off a finger. While you have a point, it’s simply out of the question. I have tried going without email before. I start getting the shakes after about 5 minutes. It ain’t pretty.
I’m sat in a seminar reading this on wifi, does this mean I’m addicted too?
The good news is that this shows you’re ready to defend your thesis. There are several appropriate metaphors for the process of thesis maturation, but none of them are pretty.
Anna,
you’ve got enough comments about backing-up. So let me tell you sth different: last summer, in honour of a lab-mate graduating, I made some of his leftover pop-corn in the micro-wave oven (in spite of the warning particularly about popcorns) under strict supervision of one of the PIs, during the time he insisting that I should keep on heating it up. This is the amazing scene: we all saw the smoke moving out of the oven, towards the fire-detector (in spite of all our efforts), the alarm, ..... The funny thing that early in the process we were discussing with the same PI how much the school will be penalised for getting the fire department there without a good reason!!
mehdi
I didn’t say I could turn off the wifi (I’m with you) but I have another friend working on his PhD and he swears by it. He claims to have infected others with this thought.
One of my labmates had a moment of panic during a fire alarm when he realized that it may not have been the greatest idea to store his backup only inches from the computer. Fine for computer viruses, not so good for fires. Thankfully, the fire alarm was nothing serious (I think it may have been due to the smell of yet another bottle of uncapped mercaptan).
Me? I had my thesis backed up in a few places, including a server at my undergraduate college, almost 1,000 miles away. I figure that protected me from fires.
Here is a cautionary tale from a pre-computer age.
When I was a graduate student, I was looking through my thesis advisor’s own thesis, and was puzzled that some of the citations in the text led nowhere in the bibliography – quite a few references seemed to be missing. I pointed this out to my advisor, who sighed and told me the following tale.
Back in the day, my advisor paid a typist to type up his thesis. The fee was a straight swap—she’d type the thesis in exchange for my advisor’s moped. All was going well, and the typescript was all done, except for the bibliography. My advisor set out on his moped on the Last Journey to his typist, who lived out of town. The bibliography – each one of the 500 or so items carefully written out on a large index card – tied up with elastic bands, and placed carefully in the moped’s saddle-back luggage box.
I think you can see where this is going. It was dark, it was raining, and it was windy, and as my advisor battled up the road, his moped hit a bump; the box flipped open; the pack of index cards flew out; the elastic bands snapped; and all of a sudden it was snowing references all over the rain-slicked highway. My advisor picked up as many as he could, darting out in front of cars, but—inevitably—he missed a few.
Think how lucky we are to have computers and back-up systems.
It’s great to hear that someone else gets the guilt when “writing” turns into checking The Atlantic political blogs (or whatever your choice of bloggy writing may be) and wondering if you have enough data to graduate.
Bob – I am close to losing it. I must be waaay ready to graduate. Seven years is plenty long, methinks.
Mehdi – I never realized how hazardous microwaves can be! Lesson learned. No toast or risque popcorn popping for me. No no no.
Howard – Nice to hear I am not the only one physically addicted to the internet. I can see the allure of turning off the net to write, but I always wind up starting it up to look for a reference, and then I may as well check my email, and see whether Bora has updated his blog… and then I am back at the beginning of my procrastination. It’s a no win situation.
Michael – I never thought I would be quite so paranoid about anything in my life. I have been emailing the thing to myself, but I think I need to step it up. I am contemplating subscribing to one of those automated backup systems that uploads whenever the net connection is idle. Then again, my net connection is rarely idle, as per earlier conversation. Sigh.
Henry – Lord almighty, that’s a terrifying story. On the last trip! That’s too horrible not to be true. It’s nice that he didn’t have to go back to the beginning to locate all the references. I do need to count my blessings that I don’t need to type everything on a typewriter, or scarier still, write it out by hand. I am so computer dependent now that I don’t even think I could compose my thoughts when writing by hand. I can only think (semi)straight when typing. So sad.
Samuel – Food and science blogs, in my case. I as terrified that I don’t have enough data to graduate. Still worried I am going to get kicked out of grad school, two months before my defense date, in fact. I, in turn, am glad to hear that I am not alone in my fears and psychoses.
Henry, I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who once cycled into a river with his lab’s entire stack of meticulously cross-referenced and annotated abstract cards in his bag. And that wasn’t the only time he cycled into water after a few beers!
Cath – what a tale… I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I totally sympathise with you, in the final throes of writing up my PhD myself. The other evening I went out, and was leaving my laptop behind. I’ve had to move back to my Mums (no funds), and it suddenly hit me: she doesn’t know how important the laptop is. So I then proceeded to tell her, if there’s a fire, can she rescue it. Her boyfriend then chimed in with “wouldn’t it be more important to save the dogs first?”. “Of course”, I lied.