There are things in life that just never feel ready. For me, one of those projects was my MSc thesis. Despite long periods of now actual work getting done, I’d still feel like the thesis just wasn’t good enough to submit for review. Being so bogged down in other work ceratinly didn’t help, but the phenomena was still infuriating.

Thankfully there are always deadlines, however arbitrary they seem. In my case, the deadline that saved me from spending whole weekends finding single sentences to tweak for eternity was the last departmental council meeting before the summer break: if I didn’t submit my thesis at the start of June, I’d postpone my graduation to the fall.

Furthermore, I found myself getting so very tired of working on the thesis. To me, this lack of passion was a clear indication that it was finally time to let go and focus on new things. Parts of the thesis had even been published earlier during the spring: clearly it couldn’t be complete garbage.

After a short scramble to make some final modification such as double checking that my references were capitalized consistently, my thesis was finally submitted for review at the start of June. After some bureucratic work – why do I have to submit the same pdf file to three different places? – all I could do was wait.

On the 13th of June, 2017, a departmental council meeting of the University of Helsinki Department of Computer Science accepted my thesis, titled “Using element-level website usage data to improve online learning materials and predict learning outcomes”. The thesis was awarded the highest obtainable grade of Laudatur, used only rarely and when “the thesis is in all ways exceptional in quality”.

I received a notification of this by email while reading an Ian M. Banks novel in the middle of a North Karelian forest. A small wonder that the email got through in the first place.

It’s been a wild and a long ride. Thank you to everyone who provided their input and guidance, you know who you are. Especially, thank you to my wife for her understanding when I spent more of my weekend at the department than at home.