Pics or it didn't happen, right?

Isn't it beautiful?

ChoosingPancakes made an interesting comment that talking about theses is very much like talking about having children. I concur. We walk around for months with people asking us, "When are you due?" Then there's one last big push to finish everything, once our work is done people take it away from us to make it pretty, then we pick it up and hold it for the first time and feel this sense of precious-ness and joy and "Look at this beautiful thing I created!" The entire process seems quite similar, imho.

[cue sappy moment]

I figured that I'd share my acknowledgements page with you all, so that you could see exactly how much this means to me:

Acknowledgements

This work is for anyone who didn’t know their racial or ethnic self until they came to college, and for anyone who thought they knew, but faced some racial schooling once they got to campus anyway.

I would like to thank the following people and institutions, without whom I wouldn’t have become who I am, and this work would not have been possible:

My mother and my father, who each always managed to affirm and insert Blackness in my life in the smallest but most meaningful of ways. My family more broadly, for the innumerable little things they did and do in support.

C**** H***, former supervisor of the English Department at Oakcrest High School, who will most likely never know that he was the first person to tell me my dreams weren’t big enough. All of the teachers and supervisors in my past who thought I would be an engineer, who helped make me who I am, even if that person isn’t who we thought I’d be.

“The Black community”—problematic as the term may be—at Princeton, for providing my encounter, serving as my immersion, and letting me grow into internalization.

K****** S****, for helping me think through every issue with this project from start to finish, as well as for being generally invaluable. E**** Y**, for being my conscience. S.O., J.B., and the entire Large Library Crew, for helping me find my voice. The Princeton Quadrangle Club more generally, for being exactly what I needed.

Professors Douglas Massey and J. Nicole Shelton for their guidance and challenges, along with everyone who participated in and passed along my questionnaire.

The African-American Studies Program at Princeton University, for instilling in me the idea that my lived experiences and those of my people are subjects worthy of study. No other coursework or interactions have so fundamentally reconfigured my worldview.

The Sociology Department of Princeton University, for teaching me to see things from a new perspective, for inspiring me to ask questions that seem to have impossibly large answers, and for giving me the tools to seek those answers out anyway.

Princeton University, for introducing me to myself and allowing me to reintroduce myself, for taking care of parts of me I hadn’t even known existed, for teaching me the value of dialogue, and for naturalizing the concept of “speak and be heard”.

It's done.

The writing of it, at least. All 211 pages of it. It's currently in the hands of the company that will print it on 25% cotton paper and hard-bind it with a goldstamped leather cover.

Yes, it's that serious. And it cost me actually $100 to get it printed and bound.

But, as much as I hemmed and hawed about this whole process, I have to say that I have come to be quite attached to my thesis over the course of the last month. It became a much more significant project than I was anticipating it to be before I actually ran any of the data. In my head, before I'd really written anything other than my literature review, my thesis was just going to be this thing I did because I needed to graduate, a sort of embarrassing little work that was too long to be published as an article but not good enough to be a book and thus kind of useless. And maybe none of those things have changed, exactly, but I still somehow came to see it as this thing that actually represents me.

This may have something to do with the meeting I had with my advisor a week ago, during which he basically told me that the draft I'd turned in was fine for someone who was just looking to fill the requirement of writing a thesis, but that I seemed like I wasn't that person. I seemed like I was a person to whom academic work is significant, and thus he was going to show/tell me all the ways I could do what I was doing better. And it nearly took everything I had and caused at least two minor breakdowns, but I did nearly everything he suggested. I am a being of integrity, and I've come to believe that my thesis is as well.

The proverbial fat lady hasn't sung yet, because I still have to email an electronic version, print out my two unbound copies, pick up this bound copy tomorrow, and walk the whole 633 pages over to my departmental secretary's office by 4pm tomorrow. I told the company I'd like to pick up the bound copy by 1pm, so that should be fine. Of course I also have to be obnoxious and take pictures with my bound copy to send to my parents and post here. 

So I suppose that I shouldn't talk about the entire process like it's over yet, to ensure that I don't bring any bad thesis karma into the world (it's bad enough already that it's due on Friday the 13th. Not cute.), but it already feels strange being able to distance myself from this giant thing that I've been working towards for so long. I suppose that it's a miniature version of how I'll feel a couple days after graduation, when I'm suddenly just a person in the world rather than a student at Princeton University. 

And that leads me squarely to #holyshititsending, which I'm not prepared to deal with at this moment, so, on to other topics!

Regression.

The irony of this phrase (given the number of ordinary least squares regression models I've run in the past few days) is palpable.

There was an era of my life when, when my life felt like too much for me to handle, I would retreat into a small dark space--under the bed, in the closet, in the bathtub with the lights off, etc.--and curl up, hidden away from all the bad things in as little space as possible, where I felt like I could control things. It was an illogical and often impractical coping mechanism, but it worked for me. I regained control of my life in lots of small dark spaces.

I'm contemplating sinking underneath this cluster desk right now and seeing if it still works.

Thesis Updates

So...my thesis is absurdly long. It's actually a fucking book. And I'm still not finished with the writing. But I was feeling really confident and like I had everything under control. I was pushing myself too hard towards the beginning of the week and I let alums and other seniors convince me that I was in a good place. And they weren't lying--I'd made a to-do list of every little thing that needs to be done between now and turning it in, and at this point only three of those bullet points still involve any new writing. I was feeling good, man. 

And then I get an email from my advisor, after I sent him a partial draft a week and a half ago, containing lines like these:

"I would like to have seen more concrete statements about HOW you expect students’ college experiences to influence identity and the direction of change you expect to see.  In order to sharpen and limit your analysis, I would also have recommended focusing on one particular group (such as African Americans in comparison with whites).  Given the distinctive history and features of each group in the United States, I would expect to observe different patterns and processes of identify formation for Hispanics and Asians."

"I would have thought that you would draw on these earlier studies to describe what is already known about students’ backgrounds, identities, and on-campus experiences"

"I would have focused on a particular group for study rather than gathering data from multiple groups with very different histories and experiences."

"the appropriate statistic would be an overall measure of categorical association, such as Somer’s D or other indicator." (I have legitimately never heard of Somer's D, and don't understand how it's kosher to expect me to know about and use some statistical measure we aren't taught in our SOC statistic class, but okay.)

"The problems mostly come in the execution of the analyses, which are not guided by clear hypotheses derived from prior research, do not really get at issues of attitude CHANGE on campus, consist mainly of exploratory bivariate associations, and could be presented more clearly.  Specifically, the tables showing relationships between categorical variables would be better presented using percentages rather than absolute numbers and instead of showing multiple z-scores accompanied by an overall measure of categorical association.  Hopefully some of these issues can be attended to in a final revision." 

Basically, what this man is telling me right now is that--even though I told him exactly what I was planning to do way back in October when we first met--he "would have done [the entire premise of my thesis] differently," in a way that lots of other scholars have done and which I am specifically trying to go against because I don't think it's productive. AND on top of that, he doesn't like the way I analyze my data, and if he's actually going to make me re-do all of my analysis, that means upwards of 104 tables and 80ish pages I need to re-write in the next 8 days. But also he's like, asking me to use percentages to describe my data rather than testing those percentages for statistical significance and I'm just like SIR, THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! 

I sent him a length and assertive without being recalcitrant email last night, and now we have a meeting at 2. I'm trying to find a way to be like, "Lookie here, I'ma do what I'ma do and you gon like it," without actually coming off like I think his opinions are idiotic and he just doesn't get my whole point. I suppose that his opinions kind of matter to my grade and whatnot. The man is just infuriating me right now, though. I have EIGHT. DAYS. What is he tryna get me to do?! 

*end rant*