Saturday, May 3, 2008

Defending A Thesis

If you go to an MFA like I did, then you probably will have to defend your thesis in front of some professors. It's pretty easy once you get in the room, but beforehand it's nervewracking because if one thing goes wrong in scheduling you can't graduate. Luckily, I had to write a 10 page explanation of my thesis (a collection of poems) before I defended, and while I hated doing it while I was doing it, when I got into the defense it paid off because I already had to ask myself a lot of questions about my work. Basically, I gave a little talk about what I was doing, my professors asked questions, and then they spent the majority of the time arguing with each other, which took the burden off of me. So defending is fun I guess and you should try it if you have the time.

RATING: 64%

2 comments:

John said...

What did they argue with each other about?

DCP said...

Just specific poems they liked or didn't like, or the title. Those were the two big arguments. There's a series in there of short poems that one of my readers didn't like but others did. I just have to make the choices I guess before it gets published in 28 years or whatever.