the exhaustion of formatting

Somewhere in the middle of this week I wanted to write about the shared experiences of the PhD student, after having a long, interesting chat with a colleague. We were reflecting, as I've done before with another friend, about how our Masters' degrees were such an empowering and fulfilling learning experience. We also commented on how the transition from the Masters to PhD was not as seamless as it is sometimes made out to be.

While I wanted to give more blog-space to these clearly thoughtful and interesting issues, I am now consumed with the ever-changing list of formatting challenges confronting me as I prepare my thesis for submission. This task is being complicated by the fact that I will be submitting my thesis while more than 10 000 kms away from the OU. Besides a mountain of logistical challenges associated with this task, I am now confronted by the realisation that when I convert my Word file to a PDF I'm going to compromise the quality of all the photos and graphics in my thesis. I can't stop myself from lamenting - why, oh why did I include all these graphics and photos and give myself more headaches than I already have? Nothing is simple when it comes to formatting a 'moerse' (as we say here on the Cape Flats) long document and I'm trying to get a PhD in Higher Education Studies, not freaking Word! Makes me look back nostalgically and wonder about all the scholars of old (who were probably mostly men) who got their wives or secretaries to type up their theses and never had to deal with all this crap.