It's about time I did a quick update on the thesis. As you know from my last update, I had submitted a draft of the thesis to my supervisor for her comments. I was a little nervous about it, because there were great swaths of writing that she had never seen before. I prepared for the worst going into our meeting.

I booked the first half of the day off work, since our meeting was scheduled for 10am. I thought to myself, "OK. Julie has booked the meeting a couple of hours before lunch, which probably means she has a lot she wants to talk about." I reread my thesis the night before, marking sections where I was introducing ideas and prepared myself to have to defend my choices. I got to campus a little early that morning, and put three hours into the meter "just in case".

I had come early, because I needed to submit a printout of my ethics training results, since that's a requirement of post-grad studies at the U of A. I dropped it off and wandered up to Julie's office. Of course, Julie wasn't in yet, so I waited outside her door. While I was waiting, I bumped into K's former supervisor and of course made a complete fool of myself. Hopefully, she was preoccupied enough with the AGM she's organizing that she won't have noticed.

Julie finally showed up (on time, unlike myself) and asked if it would be alright if we went and got some coffee before our meeting. I said sure, and we wandered down to Hub (the student food/shopping/residence concourse for those not familiar with the campus). In the 5 minutes it took us to walk down to Hub from the Humanities building, I learned that Julie was quite happy with the thesis' condition, and that despite some minor fixes she'd like and a rewrite of the last two paragraphs of the conclusion, it was ready to go to a fairly easy defense. The chapter I was most worried about, which deals with theoretical models of identity formation, turned out to be exactly what she would have wanted me to do, and she really had no quibbles with it. In her words, she would be the one in the defense that would be hardest on me in that regard, and she thought it was done well. So yay.

All that remains now is to select a date for the defense, and it's looking like it will happen some time between January 7^th and 11^th. I'm nervous, of course, not because I don't think the thesis stands up to scrutiny (I think it does), but because I'm not great in front of a crowd, be it large or small. It should really be more of a Q&A session though, so perhaps I'll be okay.