thesis progress

[transposable_element]

I decided to post about this because I feel like I need some motivation to get it done.

So far:

I have a clean final draft of three sections: introduction, literature review, and methods. This afternoon I made what I think is a very pretty figure on inverse PCR for the methods section, and I need to go look up some primer sequences so I can add them, too, but that ought to be just cut and paste.

I'm about to start my second round of edits on the results section, but I still have a chunk (about 20% of the total) still to write.

The discussion section is outlined.

The bibliography is done (thanks, Refworks!), except that I will need to go through it and take out any references that I haven't actually cited.

I'm planning to write the abstract when I'm done with everything else. Oh, and I need to come up with a title. And then I need to go through and look for semicolons, because apparently one of the people in the graduate studies office who will have to sign off on the thesis hates them. I hope s/he understands that semicolons are used in genotype notation for Drosophila.

My goal is to finish the results section and complete a first draft of the discussion by March 15. That's really the hump; after that it's just editing, and my advisor is pretty quick with that. The whole thing is supposed to be submitted by April 1, an ominous date.

Comments

[rthstewart]

Good luck!! It's SO CLOSE. Do you have to do an oral defense as well?

[transposable_element]

I don't have a formal oral defense, but I have to give a talk that's open to the public. That doesn't worry me too much because I have presented the research as a WIP multiple times to the denizens of our lab.