The Big Push

April 10, 2009 in history, thought, williams, work

As the title of this post says, I am starting The Big Push, the Last Hurrah of my undergraduate career. Right now it is April 10th. On May 19th, I defend my thesis, and on June 7th I graduate from Williams. Hopefully. That leaves just a little more than a month for dicking around and actively avoiding my work (presuming, likely fallaciously, that this will not figure prominently in my later life), and lord knows I have a lot of that left to do.

I think, at this point, my friends can’t figure out why I can’t just get my act together and finish things a little early like normal people do. Sure, there are perfectly good reasons that make for tempting rationalizations—I conduct an a cappella group! I write a blog! I have a hobby—but the truth is, I get some kind of sick thrill out of pounding papers out at absolutely the last minute. As miserable as it is from a material/physiological point of view, there is something undeniably awesome about getting jazzed enough to pull off really good procrastination. Sure, I felt accomplished when I finished my last tutorial paper almost a day early, but I was also disappointed about how it came out and in that situation my usual excuse—that I did the best job I could given the time I had to write it in—didn’t apply.

Don’t get me wrong: I am under no illusion that my procrastination is rational or calculated. At the root of it is the disappointment I alluded to. At some deep, reptilian level, I hate the idea that my work will never be perfect or even as good as I think it could or should be, and a lot of my resistance to doing work comes from a desire to avoid that disappointment. Once I get over the initial hurdle of “oh my god this sucks,” actually doing the work is pretty fun, even though the active search for distractions persists in many cases.

That’s the point where I am now with my thesis: getting over that first hump. And I think I’m just about at the top of it. It’s strange to think that, at least in my case, the biggest challenge of writing a thesis isn’t intellectual or academic (although those certainly aren’t trivial) but rather psychological, but there you have it. I suspect that everyone wrestles with these sorts of issues as part of any really big project, and that may be the real value of these things: they force us to confront our inadequacies and personal demons.