Here's what happened. I had filled out this handy-dandy Timeline Worksheet from the Faculty of Grad Studies (FOGS) that lets you figure out when you need to have stuff done and determined that in order to defend my thesis in mid-November, I would need to have it submitted to FOGS to go to the External Examiner by Aug 30.
Looks all well and good, right?
Now that it's Aug 12, I've come to accept that that's not going to happen, as one of my supervisory committee members goes on vacation on Aug 16, so I would have needed to give her my thesis to read about 2 weeks ago in order for her to read it before she leaves.
So, I've talked to my supervisor and set a new and improved deadline for submitting my thesis for examination. She was surprisingly nonchalant about the whole thing ("oh yea, it always takes you a semester longer to write than you think it will," "no one ever makes that deadline anyway") -- a far cry from the "we won't be missing any deadlines!" that I heard back in May when we first discussed it.
Anyway, I decide to re-do my Timeline Worksheet and make this discovery of how remarkably stupid I am.
I assumed that to calculate date "C", you took Date B and subtracted 6-7 weeks (since in the calculation before it, you used Date A and in the calculation after it, you use Date C... so Date A, then Date B, then Date C, right? Wrong! Apparently Date A, Date A, Date C makes more sense to them. You need a friggin' Ph.D. to understand these goddamn forms!
So, now I've re-done the form and discovered that I don't need to have my thesis to FOGS until....
October 4!! And I had thought I was supposed to get it to them by August 30th. D'oh!
So this is good. It gives me some breathing room. But it could also be very bad, as I, like all grad students, work to deadlines. I wonder if I can convince myself that I still need to get it done by the end of the month...
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