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Thesis copy (which may be handwritten) is generally not too difficult to handle. Unless you're a well-organized person, however, the work can be a pain in the neck. You should know before you begin that a supervisory committee will read each draft, make critiques, and demand corrections and you'll have to type and retype all the successive versions. It's important to make a note of margin settings, table style, and any peculiarities of a given job, and keep all this information together until the student notifies you that he's really and truly finished. I had no idea what I was getting into on my first attempt, and spent a lot of time redoing tables that didn't maintain the required continuity of the study.

Yet an additional hang up with theses is the fact that the candidate for an advanced degree may be working against time. I remember one occasion when I promised to complete a "small section" originally supposed to be less than 80 page sin 48 hours. No sweat, right? Wrong! The job turned out to be closer to 180 pages, including a totally unstructured bibliography, and I typed for 36 hours straight. The $10.00 bonus I collected was small payment for four days' recuperation in bed while a backlog of other clients' work built up. Moral: See the manuscript before you commit yourself, and don't promise what isn't feasible. Your two biggest responsibilities as a typist are accuracy and meeting deadlines. If you can't finish the work, don't take on the job.

There's one more point you should know about academic typing: A graduate student who is doing his Ph.D. for an out-of-town university will have to travel there to take his orals (a requirement for the completion of the doctorate). Because he may have to make last-minute corrections in his dissertation during that period, he'll be provided with the names and addresses of secretaries near the school along with a note of what typewriter and type style each one uses. Be sure to go over the list with your client and point out which typists have machines identical to yours, so that any late changes will match the work you've already done.

TAXES AND THINGS

Clients vary somewhat in their handling of deductions and suchlike. Both the deposition services I worked for withheld FICA (social security) from my checks, for instance, while the secretarial service and the doctor didn't. All, however, sent me W-2 forms at the end of the year. (See Gail's article in MOTHER NO. 25 for some notes on how to be a self employed taxpayer.)

It's essential to keep careful financial records and to hang on to the receipts for all supplies. Note that-while you can't deduct the total purchase price of things like typewriters in one year-you can allow for depreciation over a number of years.

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