DONE!

I completed my final submission today in thesis and shared the link with my teacher. This means I'm officially done with senior thesis!

It's crazy to think that it's finally all over. It's been a great experience, though - it's been a long, sometimes tough journey, but I made it and I learned from it. I'm honestly kind of glad I had to do a thesis because it's definitely taught me things. Besides, I already know I'll have to do a senior thesis capstone project-type thing in my third year in the PACT program, so this has already in essence prepared me for that. On that note, today is May 1st, aka Commitment Day! Congratulations to everyone who's finally made their decision today. I had already committed a few weeks ago, but it's still exciting to me; every time I think about it, I get excited all over again. I can't wait for AP exams to be over so that I can really start thinking about college and getting excited about the next stage of my life.

Final submission almost complete

Today in class I got a lot done on my final submission - specifically, I was able to go through all 100+ of my emails between my mentor and I and copy them into a Word document and upload that to my Process Record folder. It was incredibly frustrating because the copy and paste function made the formatting really weird, so it took absolutely FOREVER to edit all of it and improve it somewhat. (It only took the entire period.) By the end, though, I had 70 something pages of text, so that's good. That was really the majority of what I had left to do for final submission; now all that's left is getting my mentor to send me back her profile form and then make sure the rest of my paper forms are where they should be. Then I'll be done!!

Still working...

I'm still in the process of my final submission. In thesis today I was able to read over my abstract and upload it to my Final Submission folder on Google Docs. Now all that's left is uploading the rest of my Process Record - that includes, mainly, the emails I sent and the rest of the communication between me and my mentor, my judges, and the director of the DCT whom I was in contact with when I was trying to organize the joint event between Pratham and the DCT. The deadline for final submission is this coming Friday, and I'm sure I'll be able to have it done by then. It's just tedious to have to go through all of my emails and copy and paste all of them into a Word document (I couldn't find any other way of doing it). I plan to have my final submission done by Thursday at the latest.

Working on final submission~

Today I started working on my final submission. I spent some more time this morning reviewing all the final submission guidelines, especially the list of all the things I need to submit. I created my Final Submission folder on Google Docs and already uploaded some of the things I had - my previous presentation, my mid-term paper, my annotated bibliography, and a few drafts of my final paper. As of now, I have yet to upload all my email communication (I'm still trying to figure out how exactly to go about doing that; if all else fails, I'll just go through them and manually copy/paste them into a Word document). I'm also holding off on uploading my final paper until I read it over at least once more. There are a few other minor things that I'll need to upload as well - I just need to make sure my name is on them before I do so.

I also started and completed my abstract today in class, so after I read that over a few times and maybe make some minor changes, I will upload that as well.

DONE!

I had my final thesis presentation today; I think it went well! The responses I got from my judges were great, and it made me feel as though I did better than I'd expected. I'm pretty happy with how it went, to be honest. It was also the perfect length, so that's good too. One of my judges told me he really liked my paper before I began my presentation; he told me it was well-written and I had done an excellent job, so that made me pretty happy too. :)

Now that the presentation is out of the way (and thank goodness for that), I can work on final submission. I hope that by Wednesday I'll be ready to upload all my documents and actually be done with senior thesis (gosh, I can't believe it's come to an end already!).

Next class...

Today I worked on practicing my speech for my final presentation. It was nearly 45 minutes the first time I rehearsed, which came as a bit of a shock, but I think that's just because it was my first time. I was rambling and stuttering a bit, so that took up more time.

Today in class I also finished my speech (well, sort of: I gave up about two-thirds of the way because I realized I wasn't going to follow it word-for-word anyway) and completed a typed outline of my presentation. That, I think, will give me a good idea of what to talk about, since it's less detail-oriented and instead has just the main topics of each slide that I want to hit. That way, it'll be more useful to me in making sure I don't leave anything out.

I want my presentation to be around 30 minutes, and considering the amount of stuff I have, I think it'll be that long. I just need to rehearse it a few more times over the weekend and then I'll be set. I can't believe my presentation is this Monday! (Ahh!)

Presentation complete!

In thesis today, I completed my presentation. It's got about 20 slides, so I think it'll be a pretty good length. I guess you could say one minute per slide, but obviously it won't happen that way. But it's fine because I'm not too worried about the 20 minute minimum. I also started typing my speech and got a little less than halfway through before class ended. I plan to work on it out of class and rehearse it every day now leading up to my final presentation on Monday.

On another note: it hit me this week that this is real and it's coming to an end. All of it - school, thesis, everything. It's kind of scary, but also exhilarating at the same time. Seeing my classmates dressed up every day now because almost every day there's someone presenting their thesis to their judges is what really caused this whole realization. And in terms of college, I guess it's the fact that I've already committed that has now also made that a reality to me. These final weeks are the most stressful for me, but in the end it's going to be so so worth it. And I can't wait.