It is finished
I just got back to Regent’s from handing in my thesis at the Exam Schools. I got five copies bound today. It cost 100 pounds. However, the binding wasn’t actually that expensive. It was the color pages. The binding was about 25 pounds, and the black and white pages printed out were about 20 pounds. And the color pages were 55 pounds to print. But I couldn’t do it all black and white because of my graphs, and none of the printers at Regent’s print color, so I couldn’t have even printed it myself. And it has to be on A4 paper, so it wouldn’t have worked to print it back home either. Oh well. It looks nice. And I can say I wrote all those 78 pages.
I thought if I turned it in, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it because it would be out of my hands. While it is out of my hands, I’m finding that I’m worrying about it even more. I’m afraid I made some stupid little mistakes. I’m afraid of how they’ll judge the word limit and that I might go over. I’m afraid I left something out when I turned it in. Not actually afraid that much about the content. I just wonder if those little things were messed up, and if I had taken the extra time that I had, I think I would have noticed them and been able to fix them. But I guess, it’s really only 1/8 of my final mark, so I have to stop spending time on it at some point and focus more on the other 7/8.
I did notice as I was turning it in that I had put on the cover page, “China’s joining the WTO” and I should have spelled out World Trade Organization before using the abbreviation. One of the most obvious things, considering it was on the front page, but I didn’t double-check that because how can you mess up a cover page, right? Oh well, hopefully that won’t matter. I guess I’ve just put so much time into it now that I want it to be perfect. Last night I was up late, with Kyle trying to help over the phone, trying to make the graphs less fuzzy. Word wouldn’t export into a PDF, which is what the printers wanted. But when I copied it into Pages, my other program, the graphs got even fuzzier. When I figured out how to make them less fuzzy, the labels on the horizontal axis overlapped so you couldn’t read them. But Kyle finally figured out that I could delete some of the labels, and it worked out. It looks much better than it would have from Word, so I’m glad I put the extra time in, but then I’m afraid that in the transferring from Word to Pages, I might have messed something up. And I tried to cut out some more words, and I’m afraid that something may not make sense anymore.
And lastly, I’m really worried that they’re going to think I can’t spell, if I used some words that are spelled differently here than in the US (eg, with a “z” instead of an “s”), but that’s just how I spell them, and even if I spell them the British way, Word automatically corrects it. And there was no way to really check that for sure, because I’m not even sure of all the words we spell differently. Anyway, everything in this thesis has taken so long, so I don’t want it to be wasted time because I messed up some little thing. I hope I didn’t. And I hope it gets a good mark. If nothing else, at least it looks pretty.