Oral Defense

The thesis oral defense is basically a sink or swim situation- you thread unknown waters hoping to God that you'll live through the ordeal.
For me it wreaked havoc on my psychological and physical well being- in a sense that I was becoming paranoid (having recurring nightmares about failing the defense) ergo, many sleepless nights. On the day itself , the prospect of holding down food was impossible, my stomach churned something fierce and as I watched the clock ticking painfully slow, I wished so badly that it would increase the pace so I could get the whole thing over with. Ten o'clock AM finally came, oddly enough as I entered the room where our oral defense was being held, and as I faced our three panelists plus our thesis adviser; I was pretty calm.What transpired in that room was a complete surprise to me, I didn't expect the defense to turn out that way.
We (My thesis partner (BOn) and I) were momentarily dismissed for the panelists to deliberate our fate. A couple minutes later, the hallelujah chorus could be heard in the confines of my euphoria drugged mind after it was announced that we had passed (with minor revisions).
I'm Graduating? well, passing the defense is one of the requirements that one has to complete (plus a couple more) but regardless of the minor details- I passed the defense! the difficulty of completing every other requirement would pale in comparison to the sheer gut-wrenching moments I spent preparing, proposing, and defending our thesis.
FREEDOM!!!! All seven of us in our batch namely: Anna, Ange, Debbie, Ray (Bon), Tinay, Trish (moi) , and Vincent, have survived the perilous waters and can finally come up for air. Felicitations people!!!!
It's finally over- well, we still have to do the revisions, submit 6 hardbound copies of the thesis, a poster, and a short note. Technically, the work isn't over yet, but at least we're done with the hard part right???