I submitted my dissertation yesterday, on the same day that my university (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) celebrated its 50th anniversary.
There were all sorts of events on campus, including a visit from Norway’s prince, which made it even more celebratory!
Since my last blog post 3 months ago I’ve been working intensively to get everything finished on time. I had to finish the extended summary and get the manuscript for the fourth article “good enough” to be submitted to a journal for publication. Since much of this work was done during the summer, when my supervisors were on vacation/away, I had to make a lot of decisions myself about which analyses to use and how to present their results. I’m very happy with the final results and feel like I can defend the decisions I made, which I’ll certainly have to do in the defense.
The last step was to put together the 4 articles, extended summary, and appendices into one PDF-file. The final thesis was 300 pages! I knew I’d worked hard, but 300 pages?! Jeez.
The dissertation will soon be made openly available in UiT’s open research archive Munin, so anyone with internet can read it. The only part that can’t be made open access yet is the fourth article, since it’s still not published in a journal.
The last few days/weeks have been stressful, but mostly a good kind of stress. I was lucky and never had the feeling that I wouldn’t be finished on time. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster – going from general excitement/hyperactivity to tears/exhaustion within minutes. Pressing the “send” button, with Tove and Torstein by my side, was like pressing “thanks for the past 4 years and welcome to your new life.” An incredible relief and a feeling of accomplishment after a 4-year marathon, yet also sad to see this chapter of life come to a close.
When will I ever have the chance to set aside 4 years to do research, to really dive into something so deeply, with such amazing people to help me along the way? This will never happen again! Of course, as Tove keeps reminding me, I’m not done yet! I still have the defense in November! 😉