Allison Shaw

Above: My final presentation at the IN/VISION Festival. Also available on iTunes U.

I’ve had “Write final Scrit Scrit post” on my Teux Deux list since May 12—so long ago that I actually had to look up the exact day I showed my thesis off to the world. Who would have thought?

How do you sum up a year’s worth of work? Looking back, I can see the panic and despair last summer and fall gripping me, giving way to a general fog in December that finally clears in late January/early February, ending with the rush to get it all done by May. I remember that it was miserable at times, but man—I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it at least a little bit. My friends, my classmates, all of us helping each other through sleeplessness, failure, and classwork on top of thesis. It was like doing a startup, in a lot of ways.

I suppose that I never wrote this final post because I didn’t want it to be over, and at the same time, I was already so done it was hard to go back to it. In the meantime, I’ve accomplished a lot of my entries on whenthesisisover.com, started my job as a UI Designer at Yelp, and planned a move with Amy out to San Francisco. I’ve also been working on a few side projects, which will go public sometime soon, I hope. Hell, I’ve even been working out.

Scrit Scrit isn’t over. I’m not done with it. I’m going to make it grow and evolve. There are plenty of reasons not to continue (a lack of business plan being one, a surplus of moving plans being another), but I love Scrit Scrit, faults, cut corners, and imperfect pixels and all.

I wanted thesis festival to be the beginning, not the end, and so it will be. But for now, let me just thank again Amy Lessler, my fiancé, personal chef, and now also my domestic partner, and Dan Provost, my advisor, who encouraged me to keep it simple, keep it focused. Without either of them, I definitely couldn’t have made it through. I also need to thank all my classmates (in both years!), but especially David Bellona, Sera Koo, Erin Moore, and Cooper Smith.

And finally, thanks to Liz Danzico, Christina Aaron, Frank Bonomo, and all the faculty of SVA MFA Interaction Design.

Thanks guys.

Onward.