Meeting Minutes

Yesterday's meeting with DC went very well. I like her. We went out for lunch and got caught up on our lives. One of the few advantages of taking so darn long to complete the dissertation is that I have built a bit of a friendship with my chair. It's not like we hang out together socially, but she knows my wife and son (she knows all about the problems we had living with autism disorder in SCT), and she's even met my mom. So we spent the lunch just catching up on families, general life transitions and the like. Then, we discussed the dissertation back at her office for over an hour. I'm grateful for the lengthy amount of time we were able to spend on the subject, let alone the helpful, yet challenging, advice she provided. I don't miss living in SCT at all, but I do miss the closer proximity to people like DC.

As an undergraduate, and even as a master's student, I always wondered what in the world the doctoral students would DO when they would have these lengthy discussions with faculty. And now I know. I shared with her the 8 details I mentioned in the previous post. She was pleased that I was very well steeped in the data and could pull out stories or quotes as needed to back up connections I was making. There were a few parts of my reasoning that she wasn't following, and I attributed that to a need for ME to go back and figure out where I was going with certain things. I had a couple of wake-up calls, but they were healthy.

Bottom line, she agrees with me that the analysis is officially complete, and now I just ("just!") need to write it up and finish. I came away with a good way to structure out what I have left to write. I am pleased with the fact that the few pages I wrote very quickly the preceding morning were decent enough for her to understand where I was going with them. All in all, it was a good meeting.

Now I just need to carve out the time to write. I like writing, and I write pretty quickly. Most of what I've written for this degree has been pulled out of my brain, via my ass, during late night, last-minute, coffee-laden, mad-hatter writing sessions. This crazy timing of my writing has served me well. So, I may not sleep very much this summer, but there is a chance I may have the bulk of this puppy written up before Labor Day.