anxiety before thesis defense
Today, I'm sitting full of anxiety. Tomorrow, I will present my thesis defense.
I finished up my slides last night. In my graduate program, it is customary to finish with a few slides of acknowledgments for all the people that contributed to your work so far, so I laid out picture after picture of every person in my life that has supported me professionally or personally for the past 6 years. Since then, my anxiety rose and has remained high. It hit me that people from all parts of my life may attend this presentation. Somehow, the thought of presenting to all my friends who haven't really seen this work feels scarier than presenting just to my colleagues.
In the past week, people in the lab would ask me how I am feeling. I would always respond that I'm stressed. It feels like everything is happening all at once. I am leaving the lab I worked in, so I need to pass on the pipelines I have been maintaining and any remaining unfinished work. Since I'm graduating, I have also started planning my next project at my next job. I am presenting my defense tomorrow. I also need to collate my work into a thesis document. I feel overwhelmed! Now today I barely got anything done due to the anxiety.
I have felt anxious about presentations in the past as I felt I wasn't ready for them, but I do feel ready to give this presentation. I have given it multiple times now to different groups. Yet, I still feel anxious?
I think I feel uncertain about how it's going to go, especially about everything after the defense. The whole defense process feels very mysterious. The graduate student gives a one hour talk to the public, then the doors are closed and the committee asks the student questions in private for another hour. What happens in private?? What do they discuss?
At the same time, I can't get over the feeling that I might have a PhD when I come out of this defense. But... I'm the same person? It does feel quite surreal...
Besides that, a certain absence has been bothering me. For some of the other grad students, their families often come by to attend either the graduation ceremony or the defense. Instead, my dad is stuck in Russia and my mom won't acknowledge my name and gender. I ended up not going to the graduation ceremony, but I can't skip my defense talk. Throughout all the acknowledgment slides, there is a glaring gap in acknowledgments of my family. It pains me as they did help me get into science, but it's hard to thank them honestly considering how distant I've gotten from them and the emotional turmoil some of them have caused me.
So anyways, I'm here full of anxiety today. Logically, I'm sure tomorrow will go okay. Emotionally, I just can't feel it. I hope my logic wins this one.