At the end of my viva I was told to sit tight until official notice came through telling me what to do next, and since the uni website said that all I had to do to graduate this summer was make the July 7th pass list, I figured sitting tight was what I'd do. Except sitting tight goes against my nature, and since I happened to be up in Norwich a few weeks ago I figured it wouldn't hurt to drop by the postgrad office and ask them when they thought my marching orders would be appearing. And it was a good thing I did, because the nice lady in the office told me that the deadline for submitting the final copy was actually the 12th of June, or two working days and a weekend from right then, but they were processing forms as fast as they could and with any luck I'd have the letter telling me what to do in time to actually do something about it.
The rub in all that lay in the fact that, while my examiners had told me exactly what changes they wanted me to make to the thesis - delete two sentences, reword a third sentence, and clean up the typos - they hadn't told me definitively if those were gentleman's agreement type corrections, or if they'd be putting them in the official writeup. The difference being that in the first instance I could go ahead and turn in the draft that I'd already corrected, while in the second instance someone would have to sign off on the fact that I'd done the corrections, adding a week or two to the process and putting me well past the hand-in date.
I hate gambling, but in the final analysis it seemed smarter to bet on the letter saying 'pass with no corrections.' At which point I found that the official binder of UEA theses needs a five-day run-up at this time of year. Which meant that I had to find someone else who could bind it overnight and get it to me in time for me to get it to the University before the deadline, still assuming that in all this the paperwork would be processed and I'd be allowed to submit it. Which meant that, rather than handing a pdf of the thesis to someone who knew how UEA likes theirs bound, I got to find someone in Leeds who could do it in a hurry, then weed through several versions of the University regulations trying to figure out exactly in which direction they wanted the spine lettering printed.
Digression: why is it that every time I've had to submit something that adheres to strict specifications - at university, to the border agency, to the taxman - those specifications are so imprecisely worded that, with the best will in the world, I always send in my work with no clue as to whether it actually meets the guidelines? The uni guidelines stated that the bound copy had to have the name of the degree for which it was submitted on the cover, but didn't say whether that meant 'PhD,' 'Doctor of Philosophy,' or 'Doctor of Philosophy in Creative and Critical Writing;' there were points in the documents where that phrase referred to all three terms.
On Friday the 9th I received the bound thesis: it was as black as my mood and the perfect density for bludgeoning. Much later on Friday (about six hours too late to phone up a printer if I'd waited for the official go-ahead) I received the letter that told me that I had passed without corrections, and all I had to do was turn in the bound copy that I fortuitously had. On Sunday I went trudging back up to Norwich, because I've had the trains cancelled on me too often to trust them to be running on a day when I absolutely had to make it through. And on Monday I trudged from where I was staying in town to the Elizabeth Fry building to hand the damn thing over. At which point I found that the office where I was supposed to submit the thing was closed and locked for a school holiday.
Because of course the office is closed on the deadline that determines whether a person makes this year's graduation.
The panicking only lasted as long as it took me to find the staff member chilling in a meeting room two floors down on the off chance that someone wanted to bring in a thesis that day. Since she didn't pull out callipers to check the formatting I figured that any minor misreadings of the guidelines would be allowed to squeak by. But she also didn't give me a receipt, or any guarantee that someone else wouldn't catch an error and I'd have to do it over again. So it wasn't until I got another letter, the one that says, "the following candidate has satisfied the examiners for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" with my name after it, that I stopped worrying.
So it looks like I'm really finished this time. And it looks like I'll be graduating next month.
And, for the life of me, I don't know how to feel about either of those things.
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