Look, M.A.!

So, to make the long story of the last few weeks short: I turned in all my work, including my thesis, and should be cleared to receive my degree whenever all the paperwork is processed.  My incredibly flexible, generous, and supportive thesis committee deserves a big collective gold star for their tolerance of my terrible work habits.  There should be more faculty like them everywhere, and more graduate programs like this one— not because they tolerate poor work habits, of course, but because of general flexibility, utility, and humaneness.  In certain ways I think the formal master's program, which has been widely abandoned in place of the straight Ph.D.-only track, deserves another look: I have no idea how to make the economics of it work, but it's certainly adequate preparation for teaching comp classes (with the certification courses I didn't take) and/or lower-level literature classes, and a lot of people currently slogging through doctorates are going to get jobs doing just that.  If you want to take five years, be poor, go to the MLA, and write a huge M.A. thesis, you certainly can, but you don't have to.  (Of course it's easy for me to say, from my lofty perch in the entering class for a reasonably competitive Ph.D. program, that it would be great if more people just got master's degrees, as long as I get the doctorate.  That's the way to sell it, by God.)  It deserves further thought, that's all.

Anyway: if you haven't hugged someone with a master's degree today, you should.  The degree has been shown to make its holders 22.8% calmer and 3% cuter than they were before they got it, correcting for the effects of the maturation process overall.