Sending your dissertation into the wider world is a big momentFlickr, GotCredit

Completing a dissertation is a lot like giving birth, if your brain were a uterus and your dissertation were a living human child.

Carrying a dissertation for several months has significant consequences on your lifestyle, such as a reduction in alcohol consumption, disturbances to your sleep, and restrictions on your movement (apart from running back towards your desk to frantically bash out your conclusion: why it is justified to argue that Milton’s inclusion of personal and political context not only impacted the imagery but also the style of his poetry…)

Then, suddenly, your dissertation is no longer inside you. It is a real, tangible thing that exists in the world. You can cradle it in your arms. This is a beautiful moment.

You have struggled through the pain and now you can make self-congratulatory Facebook posts and take Snapchats of it looking all cute and dissertation-y. You can quote its first words, lovingly – “The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was officially established on the 22nd July 1940…” Aww.

But, all too soon, your dissertation must leave you. It feels like you only finished it yesterday, because you totally did, and now it has to be dropped off along with everyone else’s dissertation.

The panic sets in; what will you do all day now that your dissertation won’t be at home with you? All that time spent nursing it is now your own again, but what did you do during the days before you had your dissertation to think of? That time seems so long ago now.

You try to settle down with a nice bit of revision for your Long 18th Century literature paper, but your mind is elsewhere. You can’t stop thinking about your dissertation, wherever it is now. Presumably the Faculty office. You worry; it’s small for its age, only a couple of hundred words over the minimum permitted word count.

What if the markers don’t take to it? It’s not its fault if it doesn’t quite fit in with what’s popular in the Cambridge School. That’s just how it was made, an adorable quirk, just like that possibly wrongly formatted third footnote. It adds character.

What’s more, you’d never admit it but, however hard you tried, you worry that all the other students provided for their dissertations better than you did. You wonder whether you too should have splurged on multi-coloured treasury tags, or spent longer choosing a title-font that perfectly straddled the boundary between originality and cool professionalism.

Did you really explore every relevant avenue of inquiry? Is an undergraduate quoting Marx in an essay that isn’t really about Marx truly that overdone? Is it bad that you developed a peculiar distaste for F. R. Leavis during the dissertation process and it hasn’t gone away?

(Respectively: no – impossible, yes, it is, and nope, that just means you are an English student.) But, in all honesty, none of that matters now.

At times like this, it is important to remember that your dissertation flying the nest is a rite of passage. It’s hard, but you have to trust that the work you put in to your dissertation has done its job, and your metaphorical academic offspring can stand on its own two hypothetical feet.