Thesis is to job as Map is to _________.

De-do-do-do
De-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you

De-do-do-do
De-da-da-da
They're meaningless and all that's true

Oh hello! Holy Sweet Potatoes, guess what? I finished my Masters Thesis! YAY! I've been waiting for it to show up on USC's digital archive site because I'm so super proud of it I want to share it with you. It's not there yet. Ho, boy. It's a doozy.I done wrote a purdy thesis. Iron-Clad, serious science stuff from a professional. Here's my favorite figure from it - it's a map I made of my research area:

Doesn't it look great? Can I tell you about how much of an enormous pain it was to make? First, I scanned an old Ocean Drilling Project map into Photoshop (which I barely knew at the time. Now me and Photoshop are like that [fingers crossed]). Then I digitally erased a whole bunch of stuff on that scanned map and overlayed a *hand-drawn* map I made myself with the dark contour lines you see. That's right, hand-drawn oldschool style contour map. Finally, I copied and pasted the stations icons out of powerpoint (bless that powerpoint) and labeled everything and voila! My beautiful map is just how I wanted it.

I'm sure there are zillions of easier ways to do this *cough*hire-someone-else*cough*, but I made it from start to finish and that's pretty darn satisfying to me. Job. Well. Done!

And on the subject of hiring someone else, now I need a job. What happened to the Phd, you ask? I'm not sure if I want a PhD right now. The research at that level just gets so specific and I'm concerned about painting myself in a corner as far as a career goes. And academia...well, I'm just not sold on the idea that it will make me happy down the road. Call it wishy-washy or quitter or whatever. I call it my decision and I'm sticking to it. Here's to new beginnings!