Three days after my March post here, I defended my dissertation. It was the final official step to complete my degree, and even though I’d been working on the research and writing of it for months, it was that final two hour stretch that was the most difficult piece. The previous day I’d done a virtual run through (so called, I like to think, because it’s the part of the process that most feels like being run through with a sword) of the presentation with my chair. I was both grateful for the technology that makes a virtual defense possible and afraid it would go haywire at the worst possible time (though it’s been years since I heard horror stories of defenseless defenses upended by pandemic pranks—hackers drawing lewd pictures on virtual slides and faces, for instance).
I defended my dissertation in the home I grew up in—a symmetry that has a nice bookend feel to it—and I’m grateful to my family for unplugging all the phones, doorbells, and computers and letting me unceremoniously banish everyone from the house all morning. It’s a great deal more than that, of course; their support and encouragement have opened the doors to myriad opportunities through the years. Despite the single authorship convention, a dissertation is emphatically a collaborative endeavor. I am grateful to my committee and mentors—from every stage of my education—for setting and steering me on a course that turned learning and language into a vocation.
There’s always something strangely surreal about being done (even though I’m too much of a worry wart to be a proper procrastinator). I feel pleased, albeit oddly at a loss for words, as though I used up my quota on the dissertation. It’s strange, too, to be approaching this graduation without another next academic program lined up to begin in the fall. This time the next step is a postdoc, beginning in the summer (on Canada Day, in fact—another oddity). As with many milestones of late, the conclusion of my defense was shortly followed by another move: this time to Stockton, California, where John-Mark will shortly begin his emergency medicine rotation. The next stop will be Madison, Wisconsin, where I’ll don the hat of a civic science fellow at the Morgridge Institute for Research.
Now that I have my green card, I don’t have to keep a staunch record of my voluminous address history, just as the pace of our interminable moves is on the cusp of easing. It’s weird to be settling, but it was even weirder that a habitual homebody like me ever accumulated such an extensive list of addresses to begin with. Someday the continual packing up and leaving, too, will be finally finished.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
