financial aid and rants and raves

Today was a huge day. I finally completed my Master's degree in Human Resource Management after 5 1/2 years of stops and starts. Most of the delay was a result of my near inhuman ability to procrastinate and a general inability to figure out an ending to the thesis paper. Trust me, this is a big issue. The length was not a problem: 106 pages plus a bibliography and 25,ooo words. The average novel is 50K or so, so I basically wrote a novella about a law that does not exist. This doesn't mean the research wasn't valuable (go ahead, ask me about religious activity in the workplace, I fucking dare you) or that I didn't enjoy the process. Still, this has been hanging over my head for years, and because my school considers me a professor, a graduate degree is required. The degree itself is irrelevant. One of my co-workers has an MS in soil sciences from Taiwan. Anyway, if the thesis was not done by October, I'd have been fired. It has been a heady week, with this cloud removed and the first summer in 4 years where unfinished grad school did not hang over my existence. However you may wish to push it to the side, there is always a nibble in the back of your mind ever whispering that you are not doing what you are supposed to do. Keep in mind none of this means I've received tenure, so the original problem still remains, but this is removal of a huge negative. More in the proverbial later.