This afternoon, after my final meeting with Dr. Hurrell, I got back one copy of my thesis and my grades for the M.Phil:

Thesis: 63
Developing world: 68
International relations theory: 68
History: 75 (Distinction)
International law: 77 (Distinction)

To put those in perspective, have a look at the scale of marks. The thesis grade is a bit of a disappointment, [...]

This afternoon, my mother kindly passed along a list of 28 minor spelling and grammatical errors in my thesis. Curiously, there seems to be an direct correlation between the number of people who read a particular chapter and the number of errors. The same goes for the length of time that passed between writing and [...]

Today’s Wadham Research Forum on climate change was very interesting, despite how all the ideas expressed were fairly familiar. The extent to which the points highlighted are the same as those in my thesis is both encouraging and dispiriting. It suggests that I have not missed the mark completely, but also that I may not [...]

My printing graph clearly applies to a great many circumstances. Having finished my thesis last night, I could not print it in Wadham because their printer was broken. I couldn’t print it in St. Antony’s because every scrap of paper had been used by other people scrambling to finish their own theses.
No problem, I thought, [...]

Turns out it’s a good thing I printed off a draft thesis to scrutinize: a significant number of little typographical and grammatical errors were there to be found. Many of them, it seems, were actually introduced during the previous round of revision, especially in places where I was converting passive sentences into active ones. Somehow, [...]

Note: graphs are the purest and most compelling form of self-expression.