All these people finishing their theses takes me back to my own Ph.D. thesis writing experience. Not that I recall much about it at all; rather like giving birth, the memory erases the excruciating pain and substitutes a kinder, gentler version.
I took way too long to write up, for a variety of reasons, but a major factor can be summarised in one word: Microsoft. In those days I was running Windows 3.1 and Word 6 (I think), on 433 MHz PC with 8 MB – yes, megabytes, of memory. It crashed. A lot. In fact I could not save documents that contained embedded images, so my solution was to insert the image, draw lines around it to indicate its position, remove the image and save. Before printing I added each image back, removed the lines, printed the page then removed the image again. Insane!
Even back then I had an inkling that this was not right. At one stage I thought: “is it even sensible to include images in a text document?” I also had a good friend, a crystallographer, who wrote her thesis a little before me and produced a quite beautifully-formatted and typeset document. Had I known then that what she was using was called “LaTeX” and that no, embedding images in text is not at all sensible, perhaps I’d have reached where I am today a little sooner. Better late than never.
Best of luck to all of you writing and defending your work.
