Formatting Foibles and other Last Minute Blips

"It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong."

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hey dissertators.  Are you using the proper graduate school dissertation format already? 

I've worked with a couple of clients who didn't use the university template.  Then, just before or after the defense, they had to scramble. madly. to get the pages in order for the review by the graduate school administrator. (I think that these poor, underpaid grad school staff receive almost as much negative karma vibes as the telemarketers who squeeze through our do-not-call requests.)

Be sure to check -- at or before the proposal phase -- that you're using the proper format for appendices, tables, and other oddities. 

Formatting irregularities are avoidable last minute errata.  And unbelievably time consuming to repair. Incorrect margins are an especially pernicious blip.

The Back-up Gremlins

You all know, however, of the electronic gremlins which strike as you're trying to hand the bugger in.  I remember when my computer crashed as I was trying to make those final tweaks.  Praise g*ddess for backup floppys (this was more than a decade ago when floppys were floppy and failed regularly.) 

I remember one student in my dissertation skills workshop who struck fear in our hearts when he told us that an apartment fire had destroyed not only his computer but his backup discs.  Since the advent of email, most people I work with use their university system as one of their backup methods -- a quick attachment sent to their own email address on a regular basis.

I've also heard tales of woe from folks who didn't have good systems of distinguishing various drafts of diss chapters.  Including one brilliant new grad who is putting off turning her much-praised dissertation into a book proposal in part because she's got to shift through gajillions of versions of different iterations of various chapters. Don't ask me how this happened - I'm not sure exactly why there's not one designated final version of each chapter, if not the entire diss.  I see these draft-labeling confusions most frequently when more than one reader is giving feedback on a particular document.  Just another example of how the diss becomes hard in part because of its SHEER SIZE.

Comments

[bright star (B*)]

I used the template from the beginning and I highly recommend this.

I didn't back up. My harddrive crashed three weeks prior to turning the whole thing over to my committee prior to the defense. I hadn't backed up. Fortunately, the crash ended up being a only-works-intermittantly thing, so during one of the working times, I backed it up, ordered a new harddrive, and was all set. But there was serious trauma for a while there for me near the end. I serve as another cautionary tale: Back up early and often!

[Becky]

You are so right about taking care of these things ahead of time. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about these things before I started. I've laid out my strategies (click my name below) in case anyone is interested.

[academic coach]

Yes, Becky does a good job of operationalizing the strategies I talk about. And since she lives in hurricane territory she keeps backups 60 miles away from her home!

gmail is great for saving copies -- so much space...

[Mon]

Great reminders--I always back up versions with the date to my two external drives, but I'm not consistent in backing up to my third location--which is my school's server. Good reminders because this thing is GROWING!!