Today is the day. The deadline. The culmination of four years of work. I started thinking about and look forward to my dissertation as soon as I was accepted onto my degree course, a full ten months before I started classes. Today has been a long time coming.
I actually submitted a few days ago, because the urge to fidget with the finished product was too strong. It was strangely anticlimactic. After months of eating, sleeping, breathing this project, all I had to do was upload a PDF and click 'submit' from my sofa. It's done, it's gone, there is nothing more I can do. I pored over every single sentence with forensic precision, every one of the ten thousand words weighed for worth. Each page represents hundreds of hours of reading. I try not to think about how only 3 people will ever read it (plus, of course, my mum and my most trusted classmate.) I have a long, anxious wait before I know how well I've done, and honestly I can't predict it at all. The school holidays are over and I have some peace and quiet after Easter, but instead of throwing myself into work I find myself sitting in an empty, silent house, twiddling my thumbs. Technically I have one exam left to go, but the lack of ceremony involved in clicking a button has left me too deflated to want to revise.
So here I am, writing this as an attempt at catharsis. After all, I did intend this blog to document my transition from armchair enthusiast to graduate and beyond. Keeping that in mind, it's easy to forget that not very long ago, writing a dissertation at all was not something I ever thought I'd be able to do. At 18, I didn't have the qualifications to get me a place on a Classics/Studies course as I'd never had the chance to study at GCSE or A Level, even if I'd have believed that ancient history was a viable career prospect. I had never knowingly listened to or read a working class classicist. Luckily for me, several years later I found a university that values enthusiasm over UCAS points. It's easy to forget how radical that really is, and wherever I go from here, I will owe it all to a university willing to take a chance on me because they saw a little potential.
Unconventional acceptance prerequisites aside, I was very conscious that a BA in my 30s was my last shot at levelling my passion for antiquity up. Thankfully, for those willing to put the work in, Birkbeck is as good a place as any to extract as much worth as possible. I hope this is reflected in my dissertation, which I stuffed with the same verve as I do packing a suitcase.
I have Cicero swordfighting, elephant-drawn chariots, Milo of Croton in his Herakles costume, a monkey dressed as a gladiator and the Moirai snipping threads. I studied and catalogued nearly 120 monuments, pored over hundreds of inscriptions, and assorted hundreds of artworks. I have 32 appendices and 308 items in my bibliography, in at least 7 languages. There is no way I could have written a multi-disciplinary piece of such scope, in such detail, without the education I received at Birkbeck. After planning this behemoth for three years, it ended up being more comprehensive than I could have ever imagined, and whatever it happens to score, I am incredibly proud of what I managed to produce.
During this academic year, my entire family got Covid, my Dad had a hospital stay where he nearly died a couple of times, and the stability of my fragile mental health was severely tested. Throughout all of this, despite the extra pressure it provided, my dissertation has been a comfort. I've genuinely enjoyed myself. I've looked forward to every library day where I now have a 'lucky' locker, I've relished every chapter and article read, and done my best Sherlock impression tracking down missing statistics and references. I've punched the air when I stumbled across the perfect chunk of epigraphy or beautiful artefact. Research and writing, to the suprise of no-one who knows me, turns out to be my favourite thing to do.
So here we are, at the end. Whilst I still have to find out whether the three people marking it like it as much as I do, I can at least look at it with pride and affection. I already miss writing it. More importantly, whatever it ends up scoring, I wrote a dissertation - an opportunity I once assumed had passed me by. And now, thankfully, I get to do it all again. Once more for good measure. I have been accepted onto an MA program at Leicester. Perhaps it's not so much of an anticlimax after all.
Now, time to start shopping for new notebooks...