Postponed?

I heard from one my my advisors today that she thinks I should postpone my defense, and let this slip into next semester. I'm not handling this well, as most regular readers could probably guess.

I'm thinking of sending the following letter to my advisors:

Dear Advisors:

I’ve been expecting the suggestion that I postpone my thesis defense. I completely understand the suggestion, and probably agree. And if it is your consensus that my thesis is not strong enough for a defense, then I’ll abide by that decision - I don’t want to be humiliated in the defense.

I have a strong feeling that if this is the case, I may not finish. I have been miserable in my thesis work for over three years, and having a clear end in sight was the only thing that has kept me going for the last 6 months. I don’t know that I have the emotional wherewithal to force myself to continue to be this miserable.

I can easily pinpoint several reasons that I have been so frustrated, but the overarching theme is that I have never felt like a valued grad student. I’ve been told often how important my work is, and yet, I feel like the person doing the work is clearly not. I don’t want to air a laundry list, but feel that I owe a few examples of why I feel this way.

I feel that every time I have asked for a little more attention, I have gotten less. I don’t think that my requests were unreasonable, and yet we generally met only every several months. As an example, you may remember that I had a bit of a meltdown in the Spring of 2006, after which we all went out to dinner to help me figure out if the PhD is really what I wanted. The dinner concluded with me decided to continue, but I said that I really needed more regular contact to keep my motivation. that we would strive to meet every 2 weeks to help keep me interested in my thesis. However, the bi-weekly meetings lasted a month, and for the remainder of the year we met scarcely 5 times. When I tried to set up a meeting in the fall, instead of leaving it to Advisor1, I was the only one who wrote it down in my calendar.

More recently, it feels as though Advisor1 has not taken this thesis-writing seriously until just the last two weeks. I started writing in earnest in October, but did not get substantial comments from her until February. In the early writing process, it was imperative that I get comments to know if I was on the right track, but instead I heard silence for months. I continued working as best I could, but without knowing if I was doing it right, I couldn’t be sure of what I was doing. It took Advisor2 to finally ask for comments in a timely manner, but only because I pestered him to do it. Oh, and earlier this week, Advisor1 suggested that I have been procrastinating, which was demoralizing.

I could go on, but this is enough of a flavor of how I have felt over the past 3 years. As a graduate student, I feel that I hold a tenuous position, knowing that you both have power over my future career. I tried to work within the system to get what I needed, unsure of how to address my feelings directly without jeopardizing my future, but ended up flat on my face. I thought that when I voiced my unhappiness in 2006 that things would turn around, and when it didn’t I didn’t know what to do. I did turn to other professors and scientists for advice, but still to no lasting effect.

Having an end of my thesis in sight made me think that I could do it. But another 3 months is too much to ask. I’m tired. I’m burned out. And there has to come a time that I stop hitting myself in the head with a 2x4.

I’m open to discussing this, but I’m going to take a lot of convincing. And you should know that I’m becoming immune to the “you’re so close” arguments. I’ve been hearing that for 3 years, and it gets harder to believe, even at this point (especially at this point).