Did something this weekend I’d been trying to do for 12 years. While working on my master’s degree, it was both one of the coolest times of my life and the worst. How did I get so lucky to land that double whammy? Well, it happens when your advisers are gigantic assholes. and the field research is the most amazing, fun, and rewarding  time.
My advisers were manipulative and often gave me conflicting information while telling me my thesis was crap. “Add that to your thesis. No, take that out. Put that back in.” It was a hellish game that had me eating an entire bottle of tums each month I was in the program. Not kidding!
Once I started my field season, I was on my own. Out from under their psychotic games, I ran my research, data gathering, and field surveys on my own. I lived in a tent, bathed and did laundry in a balmy 55 degree ocean once a week, conducted business in an outhouse, and stunk of garter snake musk for four months (it was a 3 month field season but the snake musk sticks around a bit longer). It was beautiful.
Convinced that my thesis was crap, though good enough to get the degree, I presented and defended it in front of the college’s folks and other researchers that turned out to hear it. Everyone there, excluding my advisers who were also present, told me I did a good job and found my work interesting. My advisers had more criticisms while confirming I’d basically passed muster to graduate. They gave me the impression I’d eked by.
One week before graduation, one of my advisers gave me the first and only compliment any of them had ever given me over the span of two years…, and it had nothing to do with my research. I was baffled. I was his TA for two rounds of Anatomy and Physiology courses, and I taught in his place when college policy was to NOT let TA’s teach classes. He made the exception since I was actively working as an RN and had access to the hospital’s training equipment to bring to the classroom. Access he didn’t have.
When I presented my work to the college’s board and a large group of students and parents in town for graduation weekend, many had questions and found my work fascinating. My presentation ran over because of all the questions and crowd engagement in my work. But I still believed my 3 idiot advisers.
I always hung on to copies of my work with the thought that one day I would re-write said garbage, just for me, no one else. Make it something good so I could say I wrote a good thesis, again just for me. But I wouldn’t read the damn thing for fear that it really would be crap. I have pulled my three hard bound copies out multiple times to bring to the burn pile, but I’d ultimately put them back in the box where they lived.
Yesterday, I pulled them out with the steely resolve those suckers would burn that same night. Then I did what I’d always been afraid to do. I flipped open a copy and started remembering my time in the field, and I smiled. Some of the stuff I’d done, I’d forgotten. Much of it I remembered. Then I flipped to the front of the work and started reading.
It was GOOD. The writing was clear, interesting (OK, maybe normal people don’t find stuff about snakes interesting, but I do), and flowed well. I expected to find a horrible mess of clunky sentences and non-flowing paragraphs, but I was already 10 pages into the thing when I stopped reading. Maybe early drafts were less than stellar, but my final copy was a well-written thesis.
I don’t know why my advisers acted like shits and played their mind games with me. They were wrong about everything. I graduated in 2004, and over the last 12 years I have steadily realized that they had been wrong about a lot of things, but for some reason I believed them when it came to my writing. Obviously I got over that enough when I started writing fiction, but the thesis was always in the back of my mind.
After reading and realizing what I’d worked on for two years was a good end product, I put one bound copy of my thesis back in the box for me to keep, not out of fear but out of pride. The other two copies went on the burn pile at my friends’ bonfire to say goodbye to the fear I’d been dragging with me since graduation. They burned well and were reduced to ashes along with the final bit of doubt my advisers had poured into me for two years.
They decided to be asses, and they can be what they want. They abused a student-adviser relationship. Maybe they perceived me as a threat for whatever reason. Maybe they were just idiots who opted to manipulate others instead of being humane. I’ve learned volumes from the entire experience that stays with me forever. I am not angry. I am not resentful. Their self-imposed doubt is forever gone. They did not win.
Photo by me of my crispy thesis. June 2016. 🙂
