Semester's End

December is often a time to look back and celebrate many of our greatest accomplishments from the year. I know this to be true because I throw up a little in my mouth each time I see a “year end, top ten, best” list (you know what I’m talking about). December is also a time to celebrate the end of a long semester of school work. For those who are fall graduates it’s an especially exciting time where there is no school next semester and also no job.

Even Spiderman?

In all this celebrating we have left out one key person: Me. Last week I passed a milestone of my own sorts with the completion of my master’s thesis. In celebration I’m going to regale you with the tale of how my thesis came about and in the process make you never want to attend graduate school.

In my graduate program there are two tracks students can take for graduation. They can either do a thesis or an internship. I want to be clear about this, although there are two choices, EVERY STUDENT DOES AN INTERNSHIP. I knew this just as well as all my classmates who DID AN INTERNSHIP. I, however, decided to go against the wisdom of the masses and elected for the thesis route. My professors tricked me into doing a thesis by slyly asking if I wanted to do a thesis

They tricksyed us!

Looking back, this conversation was kind of like those bad horror movies where the dumb protagonists go inside the scary house even though we all know it’s a terrible idea. When asked if I wanted to do a thesis I should have said, “NO!” But I didn’t. I willingly went into the scary house to be decapitated.

That summer I did preliminary research which involved reading journal article after journal article for a few hours every day. Most people would probably think just a few hours a day doesn’t sound too bad but you try deciphering what “long axis rotation: the missing link in proximal-to-distal segmental sequencing” means. It’s not fun. After doing this all summer I planned on conducting my experiments in mid-October.

October came and went and I had done no experiments. I cannot stress how slow things move in academia. It’s slow, slow, very very slow. In order to conduct my experiments, I needed to get subjects which I couldn’t do without university approval which I couldn’t do without finalizing my design which I couldn’t do without my thesis committee’s approval and on and on and on. With the help of my professors I did come up with a title: The Effect of a Three Set Tennis Match on Knee Kinematics and Leg Muscle Activation During the Tennis Serve.

The excitement is palpable

I did eventually get my experiments set up. Unfortunately, they were during the last two weeks of the school year in December which led to no small levels of stress on me during this time. If I had been a coffee drinker at this time I would have died from a caffeine overdose. Now you might think that conducting the experiments would be the toughest part of a thesis; after that, everything is pretty much done. I thought the same thing but I was so, so wrong. Once the experiments are done everything else doesn’t just magically fall into place.

I filmed people playing tennis and then later digitized certain parts of the serve in order to analyze what was actually happening during the serve. Digitizing is BORING! And I had 300 videos to digitize. It took two weeks of me sitting at a computer with blood pouring from my eyes to finish digitizing all these videos. After I had completed this, I really felt I had turned a corner and was close to completion. I was wrong again. Next came more analysis, and more analysis, and just to change things up I did some more analysis. By this time I was done with this the spring semester was over.

Then came the writing. Now I had written my introduction the previous fall so by the time I came back around to writing the rest of the paper I had forgotten what I said in my introduction! On most days the writing went fairly well but there were some weeks that made me long for a truck to run me over. It’s not a great feeling when after 3 hours of revising and writing you have added a grand total of two lines to your thesis, or even worse, have negatively added to the length of your paper.

Then came formatting the paper which was the most frustrating part of the whole experience. I’m no computer genius, but I feel I have a decent grasp of how computers work and I’ve been using word processors since I was a little kid. Apparently Microsoft Word was programmed by the devil in an attempt to make everyone hate their lives. I spent a whole day trying to get the page numbers to work correctly. A whole day! The table of contents? I still don’t know how I ever got that to work. Most likely I promised fealty to someone and naming rights to my first born.

Word Processor Developer

After everything was written and my desire to jump in front of a truck had been abated, it was time for my thesis defense. This is when a student presents their thesis to their committee and defends what they have done. If the committee accepts the thesis the student gets to graduate, but if they don’t accept the thesis, then the student spends the next 12 months crying themselves to sleep at night. My defense lasted two and a half hours! While this is a long time it was actually fun and exciting. When you get five nerds in a room to talk about science, we can go for a long time. “So that’s really exciting. The graph shows Median Power Frequency of the biceps femoris was actually increasing along the vertical axis…

I did have to make a few corrections after my thesis defense. No biggie. These would only take me another four months to complete. From the time I started work on my thesis to its completion and final acceptance last week was a total of 18 months. And what has this experience taught me (other than my affinity for wanting to jump in front of moving vehicles)? Not much that I can see. Only an in depth knowledge of serving biomechanics, proper experimental design, proper documentation of experiments, motion capture technology, muscle function with regards to fatigue, ball flight mechanics, participant recruitment, statistical testing, Microsoft Word, academic processes, perseverance, determination, and the will to succeed. 

Yeah, it probably wasn't worth it.