I am in the throes of scheduling my thesis defense, which can be quite a daunting task. It may get pushed back to June due to a troublesome committee chair who claims to be out of town most of May. He's good friends with my boss, however, and my boss wants me to graduate in May now due to something-or-other, so I'm thinking they'll get it worked out, especially if I complain loudly enough which I'm very willing to do. Both my boss and my committee chair seem to like me enough to help me out with this graduation thing, although I can't imagine why since I insult both of them every chance I get. I hope my new boss is tolerant of that sort of thing, and a Democrat. I'm not sure what it would be like working for a Republican but it can't be good.

So during my break from thesis-writing, I've attacked the stack of graduation paperwork full-on. This stuff is tough, man. I was starting to wonder today whether part of getting the PhD is figuring out how to fill out all the forms. They offer no directions for filling them out, forgot at least two on their "Master Checklist" (leading me to wonder how important they really are) and often neglect to tell you where to turn them in or even whether you need to turn them in. I'm pretty sure I'm going to screw this up since I'm notorious for screwing things like this up (although I didn't screw up the taxes this year so things are looking up!). Fortunately our graduate program has a pretty sharp office manager who can usually figure out what's going on. I personally wrote one of the recommendations that recently won her a sweet cash award so hopefully I will get some special treatment too. Just in case, though, I scheduled in some serious brown-nosing time today and I think it was effective because I already got help from her with one of the forms. Maybe I outta try some of that brown-nosing to get my committee chair to agree to a May defense... I hear cookies can be helpful...