the best defense is a good offense
As of 04/29/2026 16:40 EST, I passed my honors thesis defense! I've spent the past month and a half (since about 3/16) worrying about this thesis and I'm finally freed. I can take what little time I have left and enjoy my last two weeks of college, though I know i'm going to be hanging around until the end of june, when my lease expires.
This thesis feels like it's taken years off my life, between the severe sleep deprivation, stress, and carcinogen exposure from the naphthalenes and cigarette smoking. I suspect a PhD dissertation and defense is going to be far worse, although I have learned a lot about research, writing, and good research habits from my honors thesis. I did quit smoking though, so that's good. I can't quit nicotine until I get home since the withdrawals are so agonizing.
One thing I realized is that I am now a subject matter expert, at least when it comes to my thesis project. I've already open-sourced the files, now I just need to publish my results and spread the knowledge in hopes that someone can get some good separations out of it.
I've heard from my peers they got grilled really hard. It wasn't that bad on my end, since I happened to select a project where none of my committee had direct subject matter expertise on. Two members of my committee were analytical chemists (where chromatography is integral to their work,) the external committee member was a physicist, and my advisor was a physical organic chemist who did preparative chromatography in the past.
I think setting the playing field (the offense) on my part with the scope of my project was a pretty important. My thesis was somewhere in-between engineering, and preparative scale chromatography, and I worried I did not adequately cover my bases when it came to chromatographic fundamentals but then I realized I can hand-wave a lot of it away since most end-users don't care.
The biggest issues is that this is a technique primarily used by organic chemists, and most organic chemists I know don't care about the chromatographic performance of their separation machines. W. Clark Still cared enough to invent the technique, and his group's project on this was the academic foundation for my work, but the chromatography is a very practical rather than getting into the weeds of analytical chromatography.
At the end of the day, I made it out alive and (somewhat) well, and I've got my thesis back for very minor grammatical revisions. That means I won!