Defense and Dinner

                Well, it’s been quite a week, from my thesis defense on Monday to a financial aid banquet last night. At the end of this month, I’ll have my final Harvard class and then head home for a while before graduation (I don’t have finals, so I’m going home for finals period – more details later). And then – off to the Navy! But for now, let’s just focus on the past week.

                My thesis defense was first thing Monday morning, so I had the weekend to prepare. Of course, I also had all those papers due, but I managed to finish most of them, as I mentioned last week, and get them turned in, without too much trouble. I headed over to the room and managed to get there 15 minutes early, which meant that I just wandered around a pretty-much empty building for a quarter of an hour hoping I was in the right place. Which, as it turns out, I was. My oral defense involved my NELC adviser, a dean here at Harvard, my philosophy adviser, a visiting assistant professor here (it’s really amazing how many ranks they have for professors), and a second reader from NELC, a grad student.

                What this ended up meaning was that Dr. Harris, my NELC adviser, was the only person who really knew what was going on. I hadn’t been prepped, and the other two readers hadn’t conducted a thesis defense before, so it was kind of informal be default, because Dr. Harris had to keep explaining what we were doing. I gave a short presentation of the thesis (which I’d luckily prepared beforehand, just in case), and then they asked various questions. Some of them were for clarification, some of them were follow-ups on my research, and some of them were modifications; there weren’t really many direct challenges to what I was saying. The defense was only an hour long – less when you count the time it took to set up – so we couldn’t cover all of it, but it was quite enjoyable (they didn’t tell me until afterwards that the defense is half of the thesis grade – it would probably have been less enjoyable if I’d known that at the time).

                And then it was over. I left for a few minutes while they talked, and then I came back in, and they told me the thesis was magna cum laude – which is an A. And suddenly, I was done with this paper I’d been working on since last summer. I took the rest of the day off to celebrate. The only thing about having my thesis defense on a Monday, though, was that it made me really, really unhappy when I had to head to ROTC at 5:30 on Tuesday morning. ROTC also went pretty well this week, though. I managed to get a perfect score on my inspection at the drill lab on Wednesday, without having stressed about it beforehand, and the seniors made a decent showing at drill, which was impressive considering we’d had no practice all semester and didn’t even know where we were standing until a few minutes before we started.

                And of course, there was the banquet last night. It’s the last month of classes for seniors, so everyone wants to invite us to things, and we’re feeling nostalgic, so we keep saying yes to them. With the result that I now have a long string of social engagements I wasn’t really planning on, but that I’m sure I’ll enjoy. Last night the financial aid program at Harvard hosted juniors and seniors who are on financial aid so that we could meet their fundraisers and sponsors. I chatted with other students and then was seated next to one of the donors, who worked on Wall Street and turned out to have done a lot of work in Texas. The dinner was on par with the formal dinners at Cambridge when I was there over the summer; it was held in Annenberg Hall (the freshman dining hall, but also one of the most imposing buildings on campus) and included a four-course meal. It’s rather awkward attending a formal dinner as someone who doesn’t drink wine or coffee – I had four glasses, and three of them just kind of sat there. In any case, I had a good time.

                So those were the main events of my week; I have just enough events every day that I never quite relax, but not enough to make me want to go out and do work, so I’m sort of in limbo. I’m kind of looking forward to the end, but I’m also beginning to realize that all the projects I’d hoped to finish this semester just aren’t going to get done. But I’ll save my final reflections for a few more weeks. Until next time!

Pictures: 

More snow/rain:

 I went walking after finishing my thesis defense; it was by far the most beautiful day of the week.

 And then it was not so beautiful...