Honest Dissertation Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Coffee and Twix for their unconditional moral support and for sustaining my miserable existence. I also want to express my gratitude to Concentration Playlists for helping me ignore people at the library. Thank you, iPhone, for Do Not Disturb mode and for allowing me to completely shun communication with my family and friends! Cheers!
It is the time for me and thousands of students graduating this summer to sit back and account for everything accomplished in the last three years. It has been distinctly apparent to me that I have grown. I have learned some things about life, about people, about relationships, a great deal about the world we live in; I have acquired some useful grown-up skills and I find myself increasingly doing and saying grown-up things. What seems to be the problem for me is actually accounting for all the ways in which I have grown and developed. I have been so critical of my work that I haven’t really recognised all of the ways in which I have improved and I now realise that I have been prone to belittling all my accomplishments.
The truth is I haven’t allowed myself to celebrate me in a long time.
I need to congratulate myself more than I need my family or my peers to congratulate me. As I am opening a new chapter of my life I need to re-narrate the one I just finished in the most favourable way possible. It is an important one since this is the chapter upon which I ground my exposition. If my university career was an outline of the framework, an introduction to the research rationale, then life from now on is an exposition job. I am going to be exposed. I am going to be brought to the test on matters much more important than academic conduct. I will be graded and rewarded or punished by people who mean much more to me than university lecturers. This article is an attempt to make up for all the months of ruthless self-criticism and self-deprecating comments. It is a recognition of all the things I have done right in the past three years and a celebration of all the things academia has given me.
Five things I have become much better at
I write more confidently. My thoughts are not scattered, they have been trained to seek structure and stick to logic. They don’t hang in the air, unsupported by reason and fact. They do have a purpose and that purpose is becoming abundantly easier for me to perceive.
I think more critically. I am not likely to take anything I am told, anything I read or hear at face value. I question first, then rationalise drawing on my personal experience and finally I account for alternative experiences and views.
I speak more clearly. I argue a case considering as many outcomes and comebacks as possible in my head before I respond or engage in an argument. I articulate my position without feeling the urge to please or oppose, simply driven by the desire to contribute with my views.
I feel more calmly. I don’t go to emotional excesses and I employ my emotions sparingly especially when it comes to negative feelings towards other people. I don’t rejoice or despair prematurely.
I love more trustingly. I trust my feelings and those of others. I don’t question or try to measure affection. I don’t look at love as something to be earned and traded but as something nurturing and as something to be nurtured.
Of the changes which higher education and all the experiences that came with it has brought to my life, the ones I have listed above are the most fundamental and have affected me permanently. They are changes of perception, they are self-knowledge, they are useful habits and they have made me more awesome just as your experience of higher education has made you more awesome. If you like me have been failing at recognising those amazing things that you have become then follow my lead, take a step back, squint a little and take a really good long look at those three years of your life.
