Deadline
As I mentioned previously I was forced to start all over again with the next course opportunity. Sadly, this had a new head teacher, and new guidelines to follow. They were more strict, but as the teacher is new to it, it was quite sloppy and ended me being over two weeks late, getting a tutor even later, which also were not prepared for it. Though, they were really friendly and have been very helpful to get me on track, while also giving plenty of pointers on how I should approach and write my thesis.
I started with having to send in a formal proposal, again. They had even less information about what they need in order to approve my proposal. I sent in a modified version of the one I sent last semester, and after over a week later, they said they had approved everyone and given pointers, but somehow they seem to have forgotten about me, so I quickly sent them a mail about it. They later told me that I was not approved and needed more information about my thesis. I sat for several days thinking what I should write, making up a couple of drafts, but scrapped all of them. On the final day I just wrote exactly what the teacher had told me, even though it sounded too easy, and it turned out great! They liked the idea, though they denied two of my three references, because they were not papers at all. I therefore had a rough time ahead of me, finding enough references that would fit into the context of my thesis.
Then I contacted the University Library to help me with finding these references. After a quicker Zoom-call than I anticipated, we both found out that the subject in itself was much harder to find citations for, and they suggested that I would discuss synonyms with my tutor. I continued copy over most of my previous work, and then conversed with my tutor about my current progress. They had no idea what I was trying to make, so they had a quick look over the structure and gave a whole list with things to fix, something I was happy to have written down, otherwise I would have forgot. They gave me some words to use in my reference search, but since then I’ve mostly ended up in using the initial article I found and look through its references and from there search through the reference tree.
As I am a procrastinator by heart, the rest of that week I got nothing done. Due to this, I had to crunch most of the next week, fixing the whole list I wrote previously, basically rewriting part of the thesis, while adding several pages of new content, ending up at about 9 pages in total. I also generated a graph for explanation, and a bunch of variables to easier back up later chapters. During this time I found two issues with the template we were given three weeks after we started to write. The funny part is that that template have been handed down for 20 years, and somehow it slipped their checks that it actually had some issues that could benefit the students if they were fixed. For references I tried to find something as close to similar to my thesis, also using some of the references from my head article, and wrote a paragraph each. Though, only five of them are valid, it is a good start so I just need to find at least five more.
All in all, I sent in the draft with everything up to, but excluding result, and just this morning got a mail saying I am right on track, and only need to adjust some things they felt would be necessary. This feels reassuring that I can actually pull this off. I do know that I struggled on the results before, but now I got loads of content to back it up. I even extended my research a little to include additional factor, something that left me with a csv 1 file of over 5000 rows. It is a lot, but I can just filter away parts that are not necessary and focus on those that with obvious deviances. Now for smaller deadlines the next couple of weeks. Bring it on!