So I passed my private defense today. I feel both triumphant and exhausted, but now I’m inhabiting a strange null space – kind of like floating between gravitational masses, I’d assume – because the first defense is done, but the public defense still looms. So I’m not Dr Wolfe yet, but everyone keeps telling me that the hardest is already past.

Instead of discussing the private defense, though, which was rigorous and exhilarating, I want to talk about the process of writing the dissertation. It was arduous. But how arduous was it?

I broke ground on the writing on 1 March 2018. I compiled everything into a single file for my private jury on 8 May 2019. Most of summer 2018 was spent on other projects, but aside from those, my focus was overwhelmingly on the production of the dissertation.

Every single day, I wrote down what I did, what chapter it applied to, and my daily word total (and, also, a weekly word total calculated on Sunday evenings). I also took qualitative notes about my mood for the day and assigned my mood on a 7 point Likert scale, where 1 = “Life is an empty void and I pray for the end” and 7 = “I can do anything for I am a writing god.”

Here’s a graph of the first phase:

Interesting to note here is the sporadic nature of the writing. The first chunk, in early March, is me trying my first stab at a methodology chapter. The pause in March is when I took a break after the first draft of the chapter, and then I resumed work by trying to edit.

What I see when I look at this now is that the beginning is very hard, but that after a week or so of pushing, I hit a good streak and felt great. This crashed, of course, and then recovered as I finished the draft. The fact that I ended up on a 4 – right in the middle of the scale – suggests that I didn’t trust the quality of my work. And the crash when I started editing again a few days later suggests that I indeed found my work to be atrocious.

Checking my qualitative remarks from that period, the following comments stand out:

“Slow hard day. Wrote a little but mostly edited and rearranged. Feel very low in comparison to yesterday. But late night effort starts paying off.”

“Disappointing! Hard to focus, but managed. Lots of subtle, important editing. Slow. Outlined the rest of chapter. We’ll see.”  

“Killing it today. Not sure if I’ve cited enough or if this is good overall, but feeling happy.”

“Rough night sleeping but made use of it by getting up at 5 and finishing my quota by 8. Still worried that I’m going too quickly, but at least I’m getting it down. Will fix later?”

“Slow again. Uphill through mud to start. Lots of reading again, lots of editing. A little writing. Read through whole doc, adding citations. GOOD STRATEGY FOR WHEN LOST.”

“Catastrophe. Bureaucracy. Residence permit. So hard to concentrate. Hopeless, grim, homeless, doomed. Can’t believe I managed this much, even. Stopping at 23:16.”

“Went to migration office in morning. Insane instability. Despite this am writing like a god. Absolutely soaring happiness in the work today. Nearly done, really. “

Now this was a surprise! I had forgotten, but now – going through these notes – the memories have returned so vividly that I can’t quite imagine how they ever faded. I was working pretty well one morning when I got a call from the migration office in Zurich, informing me that my and my family’s residence permits would not be renewed. We were getting kicked out of the country.

As if it’s not hard enough working on a dissertation as it is, right? Like trying to build a house during an earthquake.

Coming up: Phase 2