#thesis garbage

And most of them are actually good!

Alright, so a lot you know that I’ve been working on a thesis this semester, and may or may not know about how much of a rollercoaster ride it’s been. Suffice to say, my mental health has been in the can, and one of my advisors is a fucking asshole. And tbh it was all his fault that i shut down over Easter, because you know, nothing says “i care about you and the fact that you’ve put a lot of good work into this project” like saying “take this 30 page paper and cut it down to 20 for no real good reason other than i believe that scientific writing needs to be that short.” But I digress

My other advisor though, he’s been Absolutely Amazing. He’s very thoughtful and insightful and he isn’t afraid to tell me what I’ve done wrong, but more importantly he tells me what I’ve done right. I don’t think I’ve ever had someone do that for my work, tell me the good things with the bad things. And I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone give me proper constructive criticism either... And he was really understanding when I kinda lost it a few weeks ago (even to the point of telling me it’s okay to go to the counseling center if I need it! That just blew me away! No one has ever done that before for me).

So on Monday I sent him a few personal reflection bits that I needed to write for this as per the honors department guidelines (since that’s what my thesis is for. the honors department is the only one to call their senior writing project a “thesis” instead of a “capstone”). We had to do an Advice section, since honors kids are required to read a few theses from previous years when they start the thesis process, and we also had to do an Acknowledgements section and an Author’s Reflections section. If there’s one kind of writing that I do excel at, it’s personal writing like this. And I sent it to the advisor that isn’t an asshole to proof (because I was throwing all kinds of clandestine shade at asshole). He sent them back to me today with the edits I need to make, but he was real happy with them. Wanna know what the first line of the email was?

“WOW!!! HOLY MACKERAL and 7 other types of fish!! These are MASTERFUL!!!!”

Just thinking about that makes me wanna cry cos holy shit! He was that blown away by it! He’s even going to give me a page of “dale-isms” at the end of the semester (his name is dale) because I talked at length about some of the things I took away from him. And just. Wow! That was something I really needed to see and hear and just. yeah.

I just needed to share this with someone because I have feels?? That I can’t remember the last time I felt them?? I actual feel proud of my work?? what is this??