Acknowledgements

My (very professional) thank you card

Hands down, this was my favourite part of my thesis writing. 
My official acknowledgements had to include a lot of official thank-yous about funding and was only slightly self indulgent. My fabulous sister wisely told me to reign in some of the gushing, but this is prime cheese territory and a totally self indulgent blog. 

You can not do a PhD alone, obviously, your supervisors are critical (even though they sometimes ignore you completely) but that's not what I am talking about (nor am I at all bitter - can you tell :) and at least I had three supervisors.)

Given that this is a blog about how to survive a PhD - let's be clear - I would not have survived (or at least finished the thing - twice) without my support network. Without a doubt all my family and friends kept me sane or at least made allowances for my insanity. They have made sure I would eat real food when funding was low or when I was just too busy to deal with that myself, and they did it without making me feel bad, they would just subtly invite me (frequently!) to dinner or donate their excess Harvest of Hope (a cool initiative) veggies to me. And one special person put together an especially fabulous care package of food to get me through printing and final edits on the day before thesis hand-in #1!

Yes, I took the cable car!!

My friends have also patiently guided me through statistics and R (even late at night in the last minute) or avoided their own (substantial) piles of work helping me figure out elliptical Fourier analysis (which I feel awful about because I didn't end up putting it in the thesis) and elephant-eating theory. They have read chapters and pretended that my topic was interesting when I blabbed on about it incessantly. And on the flip side of that, they avoided talking about too, which is sometimes also required and appreciated. They have given me hugs and not judged me for my ugly cries and forgiven me for missing out many social activities in the frequent (recurring) PhD lock-down periods. 

If you want to survive your PhD, don't take these gems in your life for granted, and I hope that all of my friends know how much I appreciate them. If you are new in town when you are starting your PhD, I really recommend that you are brave and put yourself out there. There is at least one nerdy friendly person in each department that will invite you to social gatherings where you can meet people. 

Hopefully your department has communal tea time or social gatherings (particularly useful if there is free wine), or if not, suggest it (frequently - or offer to organise it and then people will definitely get to know you!) I hate having to mingle and make small talk, but trust me, you will be grateful that you have friends to do crazy things like offer to read chapters or listen to your rants or get you out of your office and computer-hunched posture by suggesting a random walk to the other end of campus and back. They will also make sure that you are alive and haven't been eaten by Alsatians if you haven't been in the office a couple of days or will send you home if you haven't left the office in a couple of days. 

I am not going to even mention how awesome and supportive and generous and wonderful my family are (because obviously I have the best family in the world) but I am going to say (again) that when I handed in my PhD, I was just overwhelmed by the number of people that sent me well-wishes. I realised how many people were supporting me and it kind of made all the work worth it... almost... the red cape will do the rest!!! :)