Intimidating Myself

I've received two emails this week from a colleague in College Town--a PhD student in the cohort after mine. She's preparing for her comps and was hoping I'd be willing to share some insight on a question that I had to respond to (most people don't respond to this question because it was created by someone who isn't on many committees). Anyways, in the course of this correspondence, I learn several things:

1) There is "talk" of my defense all around the department. Ok--not a huge program, not surprising. But I was liking the idea of quietly slipping into College Town to have my defense and then coming back home. Apparently, that's not going to happen. Ugh. I can't even completely articulate how I feel about this. Ugh.

2) I am defending before quite a few ABD'rs in my area. This was news largely because the person who emailed me listed all the names of the ABD folks and I didn't really even recognize that THAT many people were dissertating in my area. I wish I had known--I could have started an online support group or something! There are basically two people in that group who I'm in semi-regular contact with and I thought one of them would be defending before me--she finished before I did--but her date was pushed back because of someone's schedule (ugh). So what is really sinking in is that I'm going first. When I defended my comps there were several us going at the same time--same thing with the dissertation proposal. But this time--it looks like I'm going first. The obvious advantage is that I won't be compared to anyone else (in the immediate sense) and I'm trying to just think of it in those terms. But it feel intimidating to not be able to ask anyone else--well how was it--what did they ask. I'm in the position of testing the waters for everybody else. Interesting.

3) My comps answers have a gained a reputation. That is the most intimidating news of all. I worked really hard preparing for comps, and I am glad that I was able to put together some good responses under those conditions (four hours in a little room with no notes for about a week--yuck). But it is so intimidating to learn that professors are telling other grad students to go look up my answers. That's the kind of thing I need to hear about after I graduate. Because right now, I don't know if my dissertation lives up to that level of work. I could say more but my head is still wrapping around this one. My gut feeling is that I need to step my game up for this dissertation defense because right now I am not at the level I was for comps. And suddenly I'm intimidated by little ol' me. Weird.