Grad School- Living with my family while completing my thesis

Now, you might be wondering why we chose to move in with my parents rather than get an apartment. First, the metro area we live in is VERY expensive. My husband is also a graduate engineering student, so without my having a salary, we could afford rent some place, but we probably couldn’t afford to eat very healthy and we definitely wouldn’t be able to afford to keep our cars on the road. Second, my husband knows me too well. If I took a job to help with finances, I’d get so involved with the job that I would put off completing my thesis.

Originally, when we moved into my parents’ basement, it was supposed to be for 3-6 months while I finished my degree. I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the necessity for it. I’d been independent for 10 years, my husband for about 14 years. The idea of living by someone else’s rules was hard to adjust to. Compounding matters, my 2 adult brothers still live at home and have never lived elsewhere. Therefore, it drove us bonkers that they expect the “laundry fairy,” “cooking fairy” and “cleaning fairy” to take care of them. My parents wouldn’t accept rent from us, so we tried to help out a lot around the house. However, it is extremely frustrating to look up from yard work to see my brothers looking out of the window laughing at us. Still, my pride wouldn’t let me move back in without doing SOMETHING to pay for rent! So I’ve spent the past few years doing the majority of the vacuuming, weed pulling, raking and shoveling. I would also like to add that I’ve also spent some time “repairing” things for my mother- and giving my husband credit as Dad won’t admit that I may have learned a few things while living on my own. I also took over driving my grandmother to all of her medical appointments to help my father out. Actually, I initially felt bad for my grandmother- until I was reminded WHY I didn’t spend much time with her once I had the excuse of living at least 400 miles away. The woman is an emotional vampire- spend a few hours with her and she sucks your will to live.

So I spent the first 2 months living at home doing a very careful re-write of my literature review chapter, which was submitted to Prof Sunshine by the last week of October. I then spent the next 4 weeks writing and re-writing the 3 experimental chapters and the conclusion chapter. I was sending Professor Sunshine weekly updates every Monday morning. I had agreed to the weekly updates before taking a leave of absence. The theory was that this way Prof Sunshine could keep up with my progress and give me feedback. The reality is that the only feedback I got was a bitchy email the week I submitted my weekly update 3 days early because my husband and I spent 5 days in the Caribbean and I didn’t want my update to be late! I’m sorry, but I met the terms of MY contract- weekly updates by Monday morning. Where was my feedback?

Remember how I said that I submitted my re-write of the lit review chapter during the last week of October? Want to know when I got Prof Sunshine’s feedback? The first week of March- 5 MONTHS after I sent it to him! This is his definition of “timely feedback”? While I worked under him, God help me if I took longer than a week to review his grant or latest article. Oh, and I had to read his chicken scratch handwriting because he couldn’t figure out how to enable comments in Microsoft Word. I didn’t get feed back on 2 of the other chapters until May when I sent a nasty email and Cced the department head and my program director. It then took me until August to get the 3rd chapter and the following April (17 months AFTER I submitted it to him) to get the final chapter. To get that one, I had to drive the 400 miles to the university and request a personal meeting with him. F@*!$% couldn’t figure out how to drop it in an envelope and put a stamp on it. Have you ever tried to revise something that you haven’t even looked at for 17 months? Yeah, it goes real quickly because it is so fresh in your mind.

In any case, it took me 3 years to get permission from Prof Sunshine to submit my dissertation to my committee and request a new defense date.