So, after nearly four and a half years, my dissertation is bound for the last time, handed in and accepted. All that's left now is to wear a slightly odd hat in June and change my name on my cards. Coming to the end of a big project is always an unusual feeling, but luckily with a PhD it is sort of spread over a few key dates. There's the day you finish your dissertation, the day of your viva, and the day you hand in your corrected version for the last time, so the shock is spread out a little and you feel quite capable of rejoining the normal world. In my case, the fact that my contract as an research assistant runs for a few months to come - and hopefully much longer - helps this even more. The Utopia project is on the precipice of some really interesting times, so hopefully we'll catch the ball and run with it.
Whatever happens though, it's nice to know, that even just for a short time, I'm probably the world expert on hierarchical tagging systems applied to scientific data. That's definitely worth wearing a silly hat for.