If 'Hearts of Darkness' was actually about me writing my thesis.

Since my last post, a few things have happened: 

I got an A on my undergraduate thesis

My thesis won an award for best undergraduate research by the state historical society

I presented my research to a small crowd at a conference

I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree   

Now you are up to speed. Graduation felt really weird because college seemed to go by so fast, and I didn’t really make that many irreplaceable memories. Nor do I feel really finished with my research or ready to enter the real, adult workplace. This may be in part because my job hunt has not been going how I expected it to. Thus, I pretty much overnight made a decision overnight that: 

I am going to try to get into graduate school to get my PhD 

This is really, really, really kind of a shocker because I told everyone repeatedly that I did not want to go for the last three years, but, in my defense, I had never done real research before, so I didn’t understand yet that I had a passion for it or that I was capable of doing it. 

I am kind of starting at the very, very beginning here now, and I am going to be going on a pretty wild journey the next year to try to make it. 

I hope that you’ll join me for some of it, give me some tricks of the trade, or just laugh at my collection of research memes. 

Here goes nothing, and here goes everything. 

I finished my roughdraft a few weeks ago but have had so many more papers that it essentially wasn’t even worth mentioning because it wasn’t as if I could stop writing. Nevertheless, I have reached a point where I am comfortable expressing that I have, indeed, accomplished a thing. 

I really don’t have much time to rest, which is not ideal, but I am so close to the end that it is finally starting to feel real. 

If you’re working on something that feels like you will never see the end, I promise that little by little, you will get there. Just don’t give up and don’t stop believing that you are capable. 

What I really want in order to celebrate the end of all this is to drink a lot of champagne and play with a lot of cats. That should be a standard for accomplishing hard things. 

Song of Now is “Bastards,” by Kesha 

[I got too many people I got left to prove wrong All those motherfuckers been too mean for too long And I'm so sick of crying, yeah Darling, what's it for? I could fight forever, oh, but life's too short// 

Don't let the bastards get you down] 

Essentially, I hope that you are working to make yourself proud even if no one else can see it or appreciate it like you can yet. I don’t think anyone else can understand exactly what I’ve been through with this paper, but I wasn’t writing it for them; I was writing it for myself. 

Best,