On Monday the 11th of August 2008, I finished writing my MSc thesis. I had already incorporated changes according to feedback from my supervisor. That night, as I crept into bed, I went over my plans for the 12th of August: print a draft of the thesis; read through it; correct the one or two small typos that might have crept in; submit the corrected thesis and then enjoy! The next day I duly went to Appleton Tower (that's where our labs are), printed out my thesis, sat down and read through it, and did not find a single typo. What I did find was about seventy nine instances of small changes to be made - restructure a sentence, add an epithet, modify some punctuation, change the labelling style for the figures and so on. Undeterred, I went through with all of that. That took most of the rest of the day. At night I had a brain wave and added an entire new section. Now it looked complete. Then I slept over it. The next morning, I printed it out. I was happy. I went through it lovingly. Then I spotted a sentence that would have been better with a comma stuck in. I decided to ignore it. Then I realised resistance was futile. The comma would haunt me. It really would. So I plunged into the files and modified it. I inserted a few jokes at places. I changed two diagrams so that the keys would not overlap the curves. It was done. On the 14th, I went to Appleton tower again. Nothing was amiss now. I made two versions - one for one-sided printing, and one for two-sided printing. Then I printed the two-sided version, and went through it from cover to cover, apprehensive about finding another missing or unwarranted comma. I did not.

Was this it? Surely not? I waited, as if for something to creep into the copy. In the afternoon I looked through it again. It looked beautiful! I went ahead and submitted it. It was the 14th of August - a full five days before deadline. It was a bit of a shock for me. I had worked on two papers earlier in the year. I had submitted the first one about two hours before deadline. The second one is one of my proud moments. We had a base draft submitted about thirty minutes before deadline, and then kept making small refinements, until the final submission was done exactly ninety seconds before deadline. Keeping all this in mind, four days was completely uncharted territory.

And then ever since, I have been a bit confused. There is nothing to do now. I mean nothing academic. Since November 2007, I haven't had a day like this. I think I'll get used to it in a week or so, and let the feeling slowly sink in.