Monday's meeting went as usual.
On Thursday, I was nearly late. I had decided to go shopping at one of the not-so-local night markets, and returned to a flakey Internet connection at the residence. Skyping my co-supervisors desktop computer was flakey, so I Skyped my student instead. (He had his laptop at the co-supervisor's office.)
The student had not had time to address all the suggested text revisions. He was instead focused on presentation slides. My co-supervisor found a minor issue with the timeline slide, which anticipated completion in Spring 2012 (a formality to satisfy the bean counter in the room).
I had asked a few questions of both my co-supervisor and student about linking back to the literature. I had suggested that a stronger link be made in the analysis, but my co-supervisor objected, stating that that section should be used exclusively to describe the student's own original work. I had no objections to that, as long as the findings linked back to the literature in some fashion. It seems that there are some style differences still to be worked out. We emerged the idea that the discussion and conclusion should deal with this in a cohesive way. (We found out later that the student had decided to start the final section as "Discussion and Conclusion"... Not exactly what we had expected, but it was clear that the student was working on something. We trust him enough to figure it out.)
My co-supervisor then over-interpreted my style question to mean that active/passive voice question that I thought we had settled. So far, I had only been editing for local grammar, without altering the student's choice of voice in his writing. My co-supervisor had been paying more attention to voice as a style matter and suggested that the student not refer to his own work in the "passive voice", by which she meant past tense.
After two long weeks in the field, I thought better of arguing about that detail at 11:30 p.m. the night before the student was scheduled to present. I'm also glad that my co-supervisor is more on the ball this week since I was/am dead tired. I asked for more text for Monday, which would be our last meeting before the defense. I asked if there was further opportunity after the defense to modify the text, to which the answer was thankfully "yes, we must deal with the opponent's comments".
About the presentation: I attended via Skype, while skipping out on a part of a local workshop relating to my own research. (The co-supervisor was late, she ditched out of giving a lecture to attend this.) I saw the presentation via the student's laptop, with which he was also presenting..., but I couldn't hear or respond to any questions from the audience due to exceedingly poor audio pickup. I'm glad that my co-supervisor was there (even though a bit late) to address live questions. (Even though the presentation and teardown lasted 30 minutes, the workshop had not significantly proceeded in the schedule, and I picked up almost where we had left off.)
In an exchange of e-mails later, there is still some hesitation about formally booking the defence for next week, but we run with it for now. My co-supervisor emphasizes that the goal now should be to get the thesis to look like it has the correct parts and order of a good Finnish thesis, whatever that is.
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