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Power It Home, Sister!

Unlike Tom with his favoured technique, The Early Riser, this humble writer prefers the opposite approach: the OMG! LATE! approach. Yes, as the weeks till thesis due ticked down.. 12, then 6, then 5, then OMG 4 weeks! I started to to really kick into action and write the thesis that had, up until that point been just swimming around in my head, in a plan, and in parts in different documents.

The (patent pending) Power It Home, Sister! technique requires a well formed idea of what wants saying, and what needs to be done in order to say it effectively.. beware using the Power It Home, Sister! on unformed ideas, as this will result in crying in the foetal position on the floor at 1am the night before the thesis due. Not a good idea.

So, start with a well-thought out idea and a plan of attack. Let it stew. Let it marinate. Go on, you can watch Oprah, you’ve been thinking all morning! BUT, eventually, some writing must be done. Your supervisor is getting nervous. You are getting nervous. The deadline is flying in, fast. It’s time to Power It Home, Sister!

Ingredients:

Coke.
Are you wondering how you are going to face another afternoon, after another morning, that followed another 4am finish? Do you wish there was a better way to ingest caffeine and spike your blood sugar levels in one refreshing and convenient hit? WELL, YOU CAN! I didn’t even think of coke, and was surviving on soy flat whites and chocolate, until one of my honours cohort mentioned it on facebook. Coke seriously improved the final 2 weeks. I just can’t believe they took the cocaine out in 1903!

Spreading Room.
You’ll need room to spread out. As you will be working kinda non-stop-day-and-night, the bed and couch are nice places to spread. Other People, who may otherwise want to put themselves or their stuff in your spreading areas should be removed temporarily. Especially if they are also likely to tell you “it’s late, come to bed/stop typing loudly in bed!” or ask “what shall we have for dinner?”.

Letting Go.
Are you possessive of your text? Do you dislike people reading it before it’s perfect? Has this resulted in you not handing something in for 6 months? Your thesis needs to be read. That is how it will be assessed. So, you really will need to Let Go and get other people to read your thesis, before it is perfect. That’s right, unclench your whiteknuckled fists and hand over your imperfect work. Hand it to your supervisor. Get their feedback, take their advice and use their wisdom and skillz. Re-write and hand it over again. Rinse and repeat until you are both happier with it. See, feels better doesn’t it? If you are lucky, 5 friends will say YES! when you ask them come over for dinner and proofread the final chapters, and they’ll bring wine and bubbles and find all the little typos, missing words, un-corrected shorthands, and you can feel confident your thesis will be, maybe not perfect, but a hell of a lot closer to perfect than if you’d clutched it to your chest. Let go, Breathe.

Submit.
I know it’s not perfect, yep, you probably could spend another week editing it, yep, you could have included more Soja/Bourdieu/Habermas, but look: You Really Need to Hand It In. Handing It In is crucial to Having It Assessed. Try and plan and schedule and huskeliste tick and drink coke and don’t sleep, because you want to, as closely as possible, Power It Home On Time. Then you can go to the pub. Horray!

Epilogue.
I know I stated here that I was going to read for pleasure - so no Callan Park reading material - in post-thesis celebration, but this is certainly a very good excuse: After a couple of decades of debate, and many years of hard work by Friends Of Callan Park (the group at the centre of my thesis) the state government announced today that Callan Park would not be developed, and control of the site (mostly?) will finally be handed over to the local authority (Leichhardt Council).

Oh how sweet it would have been if this announcement was made just a few days earlier so I could have included this in my thesis, but it is also awesome awesome news, and a victory for active citizens!! Horray FOCP! It is hard to accurately explain how this victory makes me feel. I’m soooo pleased for FOCP, for all the hard work and passion they’ve put into the fight, and I just feel so *hopeful* and *optimistic* about this state government decision, after so many indications that this was a losing battle, against a state that just didn’t care.

so, Power It Home Sister! Congrats to FOCP! We made it! Congrats to my honours cohort! We made it! Thank You friends and t+z readers! We made it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 5:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.