Saturday 19 April 2008

Dissertation Blues

19th of April... That leaves 6 days until the 25th of April. My deadline. Clearly I don't want to be rushing about with anything to do with my dissertation except hand it in on the 25th, so realistically it needs to be ready on the 24th. By being ready on the 24th, it needs to be bound, so the writing needs to be done by the 23rd. I'd like a day to fiddle around and make sure things are worded perfectly and the lay out is spot on, so this brings me to the 22nd. So why, 3 days before i need this all to be done has my tutor gone AWOL?! He's not sent the results he insists I should add into my project and I can't get hold of him. Grrrr.

This dilemma leaves me in two minds.
1. Ignore him. Just finish off my dissertation as it is. Slight problem as he is one of the people marking the dissertations.

2. Wait until Monday (thats the 21st), probably manage to get the results by 5.30/6pm, sit up all night struggling to statistically analyse, present nicely and then discuss these results. Probably do badly as I'm rushing and drag the overall quality of the project down.

I think the most sensible thing at the moment is to spend today and tomorrow perfecting the dissertation as it is, and then IF i get the results on monday I have the option of pulling an all nighter to get them added in and explained in a half decent manner.

More and more I'm starting to feel like both the unlucky and stupid one doing my BSc. Everyone else seems to be coping fine with their write-ups, just happily getting on with it. No doubt helped by the actual feedback they've got, as opposed to the non-exsistant feedback I've had. I'm usually completely fine doing things independently, but for once I would really like one of my supervisors to be willing to look over what I've written, even if it's just quickly for 10 minutes and tell me whether or not I'm going in the right direction. It seems that compared to everyone else I'm going to be handing in what is more like a first draft, while they've had the opportunity to adjust their work with feedback.

"Talk to the head of your course about this!" all the people i tell say, "It's not fair, they should sort it out." Well I have been trying to talk to the head of my course... because he's my supervisor!!!

This is really getting me down.

Lily xXx

1 comment:

Dragonfly said...

I sympathise. I also had a rubbish supervisor who took 2 months to read my literature review, then gave it back to me 3 days before hand in telling me to rewrite it (his exact words were "I have done a lot of work on your lit review). He went on holiday the week before that and failed to give me clinical data that I needed. And don't get me started about being 6 weeks into honours and discovering your ethics has not even been applied for (when you were assured it was all taken care of months ago).
*Sends hugs*. When it is all over you will have a wonderful feeling of "thankGoditsover, theycan'tmakemedoitagain, theycan'thurtmeanymore, hahahahahah".