Dissertation is printed!

My dissertation came from the printing company yesterday. Here’s a picture of some of them:

It feels a bit weird to see the final book lying there, being the result of a year of planning and three years of hard work. I wrote most of it last spring, submitting the manuscript in July. Now, about half a year later, I have a much more distant relationship to the whole thing. Seeing the final result is comforting, but it is also sad to let go. I enjoyed working on the project, and I will continue to work on a related topic, but still it feels like it will never really be the same. I guess that’s the point of doing a PhD, to succeed climbing up a ladder and to start exploring from there.