Dissertation Compression

I am applying for a Dissertation of the Year award through a professional association of which I am a member. It was DC's idea, which in itself was pretty flattering.

It's due June 1, and DC technically needs to submit it on my behalf. That means I need to get it to her this week. "It" is a 15-page abstract of my over-200-page dissertation. Yes folks, that means that over 185 pages of my dissertation was just a bunch of hogwash. It will only take 15 to apply for a prestigious award I probably won't win. Isn't that funny?

I'm not in the least bit stressed about it. OK, let me rephrase that. I'm not in the least bit stressed about whether or not I win the award (I'm just a tad bit stressed about getting the application done on time). If I do, it will be a wonderful, and completely unexpected occurrence. If I don't, no big whoop. I will come out of this process with a condensed version of the dissertation out of which I can hopefully spin off a couple of articles or at least a decent conference presentation. I'll spend the next few days working on it, but no more, and out of it should come something usable.

I'm glad to be back into that academic side of my brain again. This semester at work has pretty much kicked my ass, but it's not been academic ass. It's been administrative ass. Administrative ass is not nearly as fun.

OK, back to getting my academic ass in gear.

Diploma

My diploma arrived last week! So today I bought a fancy frame, and I have to admit that I can't stop looking at it. I crack me up.

But it's ironic that the external symbol of the completed degree and "commencement" arrived last week because I also had a few serious discussions with others about the future of my career. While I like the job I have currently, I've always known it won't be the job in which I retire. This clearly brings up the question: "NOW WHAT?" I envisioned staying here about five years and then moving to a different administrative position in higher education. However, at this point that feels like a waste of my research skills. While it took me a long while to finish the degree since it was rarely my top priority, I did enjoy the work a great deal. I think I'm a decent writer, too, and I do enjoy living in Theory World for good amounts of time. Fortunately given the administrative career I've had and the theoretical dissertation I wrote, I am starting to build a couple of different research agendas that could allow me to balance a faculty career in between Theory World and Reality World, and I think I might like that balance. If I could build that into a faculty career, well that could be a decent future career.

There's a bit of a risk with the process of earning tenure. And, if that doesn't happen, then there I'll be in my mid-40s without a job. That's kept me from seriously considering this route in the past. But then again, several years ago the thought of writing a dissertation was daunting enough that I suppressed the thought of getting a Ph.D., and here I am. So what's so say pursuing the faculty route would be a bad risk to take? After all, most times we take well-informed risks, it leads to something pretty swell.

We'll see. For now I'm still pondering the possibilities, and I'm fortunate that Wife is encouraging me to continue the thought process as well.

Final Confirmation

It's been a funny week or so. After submitting the document online on Saturday the 13th, I needed to get the paperwork signed by my chair. We had a great exchange: She said she's giving me till January, and then we're going to discuss how to get this study published. I don't think I could ask for a better compliment than that. We both agreed that this is more of a beginning of a research career than an end to graduate school. That's sort of neat, though holy SHIT I'm glad the graduate school part is ending!

Then I delivered the signed paperwork to The Graduate School in person, that same day. In the past, there would have been a grumpy person sitting in that office with a ruler in hand to make sure all of my margins lined up appropriately. Since I submitted it online, I thought I circumvented that process. Au contraire mon frere! I received an e-mail from The Graduate School the following day indicating I needed to do things like: "1) remove the word 'Dedication' from your dedication page [seriously?], 2) remove the word "Abstract" from the abstract page [what the FUCK?], and 3) the margins of your CV [attached to the end of the dissertation] are too small...please readjust." THOSE were the barriers between me and finishing? Um...OK. Whatever.

It took me just a few minutes to make the changes and resubmit. Then I gently prodded The Main Office of my Department to ensure the details of my transcript were in line (we receive temporary grades for "dissertation research" credits till the dissertation is done, and those need to be cleared out before our degree is conferred). That was completed last Friday.

So today I finally received the following note from The Graduate School:

Dear Robert of Chesterley,

All requirements are now completed for the awarding of your Ph.D. degree. Your official graduation date is November 30, 2010.

The Office of the Registrar will mail your diploma to your Student Home Address approximately three months after your official graduation date. Please verify that this address in [The Student System] current and correct for the mailing of your diploma. If your Student Home Address is incorrect, please contact the Registrar's Office.

Also, please check your Primary Name in [The Student System] for your diploma. If your name is incorrect, please contact the Registrar's Office.

I will submit the final approved version of your dissertation to ProQuest/UMI for publishing after your official graduation date.

Congratulations on this wonderful accomplishment!

Best Regards,

"Jane Q. Smith"
Doctoral Recorder
University Graduate School
Large Midwestern University

So, I guess that's it. It's all done. The curtain is down. The orchestra cadenced. There's nothing more to do but be a doctor from here onward.

I am of two minds. I'm so glad this crap is finally finished. Holy smokes. At the same time, this journey has been one of the best things for my career. Even after having a shitty day at work, I still come out of the experience actually liking my job. If it weren't for the doctorate I would not have joined this research field. So I'm thankful for that experience. And I'm also thankful this journey has finally ended.

Yay.

Almost there

It's been a good, productive week. I've carved out time in my schedule to do both dissertation work and work-work. I've started using Twitter again (got a MUCH better app for my Damn Blackberry), so I can quickly post things up here I'd like to remember.

I have a small part of one section left to do this evening. That literally fell together quite quickly, during my last hour or so at the office today, after I had two meetings in a row. Where do I find the energy? Then, either I'm going to pull together the last section very quickly, or it'll be end up as part of the theory chapter. I haven't decided yet. Guess I should get on that soon.

When I'm done with the actual writing, I then need to pull together 12 small Word documents that I've been constructing into one big-ass document that will form the chapter in its entirety. I've been considering how I'll actually arrange all of these for some time now, so it may actually come together rather quickly. It's funny: I still don't know how many pages this chapter is going to be. That sort of cracks me up.

I may be up half the night, but that's alright. Honestly, there were some papers in my coursework that I started at 9:30 PM the night before they were due, and I would usually get A's. Tonight I'm much farther along, I'm just shooting for a draft to be done for tomorrow. No problem!

I'm not exaggerating when I say I have never been so relaxed going into An Evening before A Paper is Due in my entire academic career...and that's been a LONG career!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Home Stretch with this Results Chapter Thing

I had a great meeting with DC last Friday (I was in SCT for the day). She was just as excited as I am about the various things I'm finding with my study. More important, she encouraged me to start expressing my own views in terms of, um, "my" theory. Yep, it's mine. All mine. That was a little weird at first, but then again, the point of all of this is to create a theory, so I just need to get over the weirdness.

In the next five days I'll solidify whether or not I'll walk in graduation. I suspect I will, but I do need to make significant progress this week or else I will not make the 3/5 deadline to give DC the first draft of the fifth chapter. What's cool is that I'll start drafting the sixth (and LAST!) chapter after that deadline. Wow, that's pretty swell.

My perfectionist tendencies seem to be kept at bay for now. I'm even to the point where I'm writing paragraph after paragraph, and if I think they suck I literally write [THIS SUCKS] as a marker to go back and edit. A good friend heard an expression saying something like, "I'm just a decent writer, but I'm an excellent editor." I like that mantra.

I think that's similar to my attitude toward being "ready" to graduate. I figure I'm never really going to feel ready till I'm completely finished. But will I ever finish unless I feel I'm ready?? ACK- that's a mad cycle! Instead, I'm just plugging forward, setting hard deadlines and trying to stick to them.

I pay my auto insurance every six months, and I just paid us up through August of this year. What's funny is that the next time I replace those little insurance cards in August, it's very likely I will already have participated in graduation and will have my final defense date set. It's going to be a pretty wild six months. However, the six months prior to the end of both my BA and my MA were exactly like this, so this seems like the perfect time to finish.

No Fear

In the Nineties I often saw stickers on the back windshields of cars reading, "No Fear." Somehow I think it has something to do with "NIN" stickers (Nine-Inch Nails?), since I usually saw those coupled together. I have absolutely no idea what the hell those stickers meant, other than that Nine-Inch Nails was a rock group. I write this paragraph only to clarify that the title of this post has nothing to do with those stickers.

Man can I spin the bullshit or what? I must be writing a dissertation!

Anyway, this post serves as a reminder to myself that I am officially over any fear whatsoever of finishing this dissertation. I'm not trying to get over confident here. Rather, I'm just being realistic. Completion is now just a matter of finding the time to finish writing, obey the commands of my committee (note my dry humor) to finish it off adequately, and turn the damn thing in.

I am extremely fortunate that I have a chair who a) wants me to finish and b) provides me with constructive, challenging feedback that helps me improve. Her feedback is likely going to kick my ass, and the rest of the process toward finishing up may very well suck. However, the dissertation is going to be completed. There are no more questions. There are no more grades. Just an ending.

Now, the challenge is finding the time...

Prepping for Meeting with DC

Hi.

So I'm meeting with DC in about 10 hours. I think things are going to be fine.

Alright, let me clarify this concept called "fine." For every meeting I've ever had with her since the spring of 2005, I walk in feeling like a complete and utter idiot. I struggle through finding the words I need to attempt to express myself, in spite of my sheepish idiocy. I sweat profusely, have rampant bouts of self-doubt, I question how I was ever accepted into this doctoral program in the first place, the whole nine yards. I exaggerate for effect only slightly.

And yet, I always leave these meetings feeling like a scholar. A young, budding scholar, but scholarly nonetheless.

The reason for this is DC's consistent philosophy, which is simply stated like this: "Everyone has a theory." She respects my theory, always. To be clear, she continuously suggests manners in which the theory can be improved. I suspect I will realize the weight of the work I still have ahead of me as a result of this meeting, but I know inherently she will respect the work I have done thus far. Wish I felt that way on the surface as I prepare for this meeting, but deep down, I know it's going to be "fine."

BTW, I have started writing two chapters at once. I have a good number of pages of each. Why in the WORLD I'm writing two chapters at once is beyond me, but it just sorta happened that way.

I'm bringing several documents with me to this meeting: 1) the data analysis process I used [at some point I needed to write this out as a sort of bread crumb path-finding thingamabob so I'd remember what the hell I've been working on since last fall], 2) the big coding grid that snapped together like a deck of cards (I think she's going to like it), 3) my initial concept map with several of the key themes written in to help connect the various points in the study, 4) a very rough outline for the structure of the theory I'm constructing, 5) a rather random, yet important, paragraph I wrote during The Two Weeks that presents what I think is the major catalyst behind the theory, 6) my code writing list, or basically my to-do list for the theory chapter, 7) the beginning of chapter 4 on participants, and 8) the beginning of chapter 5 on the theory (much of which I wrote this morning (alright, technically Tuesday morning).

One may think I'm wasting my time by writing all this out in my blog, but it's actually helping me organize my thoughts for what the hell I'm going to actually discuss with DC tomorrow (today).

Again, I think it's going to be "fine." However, the process of getting there is going to kick my ass.

Bye.

Motivation

I'm indebted to my good friend, Gibsyn, for a very motivating phone call this morning. This is a friend who I worked with at Large Urban Southeastern University several years ago when she was completing her doctorate. She provided several tips for focusing on COMPLETION, all of which I will be likely to use in the next several months. She also shared with me that these same issues we all deal with (impostor syndrome, setting our own timelines and sticking to them) are things professors deal with on a regular basis. The difference here is that these issues are most intense during the doctoral candidacy process and they tend to become more routine the longer we do them and the more approval we receive from the academic society, as it were.

I am gearing up for having two weeks in March to focus only on the dissertation. Between now and then, I need to get the data analysis bear tamed to a point where I can get some good writing done during the time away from work.

Also between now and then I have a rather long to-do list at work that I must complete, and a class I'm teaching that I must finish.

Note my attempt in using finite timelines to structure my work? Ugh. Sometimes this constructivist bullshit of creating our own learning environments gets too exhausting. Am I actually missing having someone else write a friggin' syllabus? ACK!

Thanks again, Gibsyn.

Approaching the Hilltop

I seem to be approaching the top of the hill. Am probably still in a lower gear, though, which means I'm moving slowly, deliberately, and with a lot of power. At least I that's how my brain feels at the moment.

On Wednesday I completed the last full description of my fourteenth participant. Whew. All of these summary descriptions will feed directly into the text for the results chapter. This is good.

Next up: I will wrestle the gazillion open codes across all the interviews into a far shorter code list. Part of this is necessary, and another part is, frankly, bullshit. The necessary part involves ensuring that I am able to list the common threads and cite examples of these commonalities in the interviews. That will be crucial to have when writing and discussing the results, and let's face it it's really the crux of this entire endeavor. The bullshit part: if needed, I could rattle off the commonalities off the top of my head. I don't NEED to do these next steps in order to see how things will come together. However, I know I will be much more organized and better able to communicate these ideas if I just slog through the data one more time and work through the tedium into something more tangible.

I always get to this stage when writing any paper. Always have. I conduct the research and make the conclusions I want to make. Mentally, I'm finished. And then, I still have to write it up and share it with others. Someday I'm going to make a flash drive that just fits into my ear, reads my brain, and finds my conclusions automatically so I don't have to go to the trouble of organizing them and writing them down. But alas, this is not the case.

I still have several tasks ahead of me in this process. However, the car is chugging up toward the hilltop, still in a lower gear, but making good, slow, strong, progress. Once I reach the hilltop, I can shift into a higher, smoother gear, get back into the writing process, and hopefully gain some speed and momentum downhill. Can't wait. Let's hope the ice has melted by then so I don't slip off the road!

Beautiful

For a while, a long while, I've been nervous about how I would weave together the 14 stories of the participants in my dissertation study. Would I be able to pull out all the nuances successfully? Would I leave out crucial information? What if I totally miss the mark on something?  

But today, as I code the 13th of 14 interviews, I realize something pretty basic, but also is easy to lose sight of during this process: It's all right there in the text. The participants are telling me the story. I don't need to make up this stuff. The information is all in there. I just need to organize it, present the findings, and finish it up. This is BEAUTIFUL. 

In rereading these paragraphs, some of what I've written seems really stupid and basic. But when I think about it, it's not stupid. I've read a gazillion articles and books on data analysis, and I haven't really seen anyone discussing the natural, and admittedly emotional, process that I'm seeing occur as I'm getting deeper and deeper into this analysis. Hell, maybe I just missed it (that's definitely possible!). The connections among the participants are suddenly just leaping off the page and coming together into related containers, like nesting Tupperware (wait, it's not sudden at all: I've been doing this for a YEAR). Researchers talk about using a constructivist epistemology, meaning that we make meaning of the world by creating our learning structures around us and understanding the nature of how we know based on what we're creating. OK, OK, I get it. I guess that's a fancy way of saying, "No shit Sherlock! Now that you're intimate with your data, don't you see that this connection should happen HERE, and that one happens over THERE?" It's natural. This isn't a contrived process, and for some reason I guess I thought it was. I guess I've interpreted the data-analysis articles as building a series of steps that must or should be taken in order for the analysis to be Successful. But it isn't lock-step. Again, it's just natural. 

Funny, I don't recall reading anywhere that the researchers need to lose themselves in the data analysis, be taken away by it, become part of it, and learn from it. But only when that happens can we really understand what's happening in the data. It's all about intimacy. Why is that missing from the data analysis literature??

I see the problem here: how the hell does a researcher TEACH this process in an article? In a textbook? How do you write about becoming intimate with your data in way that researchers will appreciate? I guess I can understand the problem now, but still...seems like a big hole out there to me. And I'm talking about both qualitative and quantitative processes here. I feel like I can only truly know enough to write about data results once I know every inch, nook, and cranny of these interviews. I'd likely say the same thing about a set of numeric survey results, too. OK. Rant over. Guess I know what I'll be writing about in my budding scholarly career. haha. 

In spite of the fact that this post turned into a bit of a rant, I'm in a good place today. I'm feeling like this dissertation is just a big paper due at the end of the semester. And it's only September. Why wouldn't I finish this on time?

Dissertation Week 2007 - Day 1 Report

Hi Blog. As I mentioned earlier, this is the week I'm taking "off" from work to work on the dissertation. No pressure, really. Whatever! I've just told everyone I know and work with that I'm doing this, so they'll all be asking for progress reports. Guess I better make some progress! LOL.

Actually, yesterday's Day 1 went really quite well. After a weekend-long snow storm (which has made everything wonderful and wintry here!), I needed to get out of the house yesterday. I went to Relatively-Nearby Trendy Neighborhood and hit the Starbucks there. Forgot I had to feed a parking meter, so I didn't stay very long. Perhaps it was the pressure of having the meter running, but I CRANKED on part of the data analysis process where I need to realize how my own life experiences may influence the manner in which I analyze my data. And I worked things out in only about 90 minutes. I was pretty excited about that.

I spent a long while a year or two ago pondering if I was going to be able to write on this particular topic because it's pretty close to my heart. That self doubt caused me to temporarily change my topic. I later changed it back because I really could have cared less about that other topic, so now I've been happily back at square one for a long while. HOWEVER, I hadn't really worked out how I could separate myself away from my participants enough to analyze the data and not project my own thoughts on their words. I think I finally worked it out. At some point I may share the details in this blog, but for now suffice it to say I made a good amount of progress during that short time yesterday morning.

I then spontaneously grabbed lunch with Wife, a benefit of working from home this week. Afterward I went to another cafe (free parking!) and did some reading from:

Charmaz, K. (2007). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

I've been skimming certain portions of this book when needed (I love her work). This week I'm trying to "really" read portions related to where I am in the data analysis process, and I'm finding it helpful. Since I've been out of coursework for a while, and am now working full-time, I must admit I've not been doing scholarly reading nearly as much as I used to. I miss it, so I'm grateful to have the time to do some reading. OK, I can't believe I just said that.

That's the report from Day 1. A good first day. Today I'm working in my home office/prison for a while, finishing up some reading this morning. I may head out to Free Parking Cafe this afternoon if I start to go bonkers here at home. More tomorrow.

I'm back

I've been away from Active Dissertationland for a while. I suppose my visit to Passive Dissertationland was still within the country of Scholar Wannabe, but it's probably on a slower moving creek instead of a faster-flowing river toward Destination Completion...Ah, enough with the BS and colorful descriptions.

After spending some time working, and (frankly) spinning my wheels on, some of the other articles I still need to incorporate into my literature review, I have finally started recruiting participants again for my study. And it's going OK. A few of them were referred to me by a senior colleague who was not certain of their eligibility for the study. About half of them are not eligible, but the other three are. Two of those three have responded as "yes, I'd like to participate," so I'll interview one tomorrow and the other a week from tomorrow. All interviews will take place in SCT, so I need to make sure I have enough fuel in the Jetta tonight. When I'm done writing this post, I'll gather together more tapes, batteries, study information sheets, questionnaires, and interview protocols to get my ass in gear again. After I complete these next two interviews, then I only have about two more left. I still have a few more leads here & there to more participants, so hopefully (fingers crossed while knocking on wood) I'll finish up the data collecting, and trips to SCT, very soon.

Yesterday I spoke with a company that specializes in doing transcriptions of qualitative research interviews. I just may pay them to do some of these transcriptions for me. It'll cost some money, but oh the time that will be saved. We'll see. They're located in SCT, but I hear mail is delivered down there :-) , so perhaps I won't need to travel back and forth too much if I indeed employ their services.

I'm really, REALLY, looking forward to the data analysis of this research. For me, that's the best part about the entire process. It's been frustrating not having much control over when I can conduct the interviews. But once they are completed, then it'll all be about me getting the analysis done on my own. The balance between this work and "work" work will be tough, but the crunch time is temporary. I honestly don't know if I'm more excited about doing the data analysis or the prospect of finishing the dissertation. Perhaps I'm equally excited for both. Seems pretty healthy to me.

Oh yeah, I want to share a funny tidbit. I almost forgot to send an amendment to The Office of The Protection of Human Subjects. Because of our move to Large State Capital, I have to update my address and phone number on the Study Information Sheet and the standardized e-mails I use to recruit participants. Seems silly that I need to complete paperwork, get DC's signature, and send stuff to Human Subjects just to update these sheets that people will hardly read, but I am a rule follower with these things. Study # 07- 11947 will be compliant. Note the mandatory space between the hyphen and the 1. I wouldn't want something as major as a new address and phone number, or a missing space character, to have a negative effect on "the risk:benefit ratio for subjects." I'm not making this up, you know: I truly had to say whether or not the change to my address & phone number would impact this ratio.

Enough. Bottom line, I'm glad to be back to my scholarly journey. Now it's time, once again, to clean the office/prison and to get materials ready for tomorrow's interview.

Fall is here?

Even though I'm not certain where in the world the month of July went, I'm in a particularly good mood today because I'm excited for the autumn. It's odd to say this, I realize, especially since my last post was about spending summers on our screen porch. However, I'm ready for the summer to be over. Summer was a time of transition, upheaval, and HEAT. OK, heat is nice in certainly places and situations, haha, but I'm looking forward to the weather, AND MY LIFE, cooling off just a bit. I'm getting settled into the job best I can for now, and our house is feeling like home.

Also, I'm excited to finally get back into finishing up these interviews for my dissertation. The data I have thus far is very interesting, and I'm looking forward to filling out the sample and moving onward more heavily into the data analysis. I have another interview Thursday back in SCT, so that should be good. I hope it leads to just 3 or 4 more interviews, and then I just may be done. We shall see, though...all part of a larger iterative process of analyzing data and building a theory from the ground up. It'll be good to get my "scholar" hat back on my head. I've had enough of the life transition stuff for a while, (though I certainly don't begrudge the reasons for the move!).

K, bye.

Interviews

During all the haze with our house-selling and searching processes, I have been conducting interviews for my dissertation. I have been looking forward to this time for about two years now, so it feels good to be on a hiatus from writing and now actually conducting interviews. Feels good to be doing something more tangible for a change.

The interviews have gone well so far, with the exception of a broken tape cassette here. Please don't tell me to use a digital recorder instead, as those are worthless to me for doing my own transcriptions (I have an aged transcription machine, foot pedals and all).

I've conducted five interviews, and I think I have a sixth scheduled for after Wife and I return from Undisclosed Location. Only about four or five more, and I should be good to go. Ten or eleven hours of interview data is plenty for this study, thankyouverymuch.

I just wanted a little reminder to myself in the blog about this process, so this post is short. K, bye.

Two Important Meetings

IMPORTANT MEETING 1: Dissertation Proposal Defense.
I passed.

You know, it was actually an enjoyable experience. I felt like I had a highly-informed cheering squad instead of a group of adversaries. They treated me like a colleague. DC started off the meeting by saying, "We all want this study to work for you, and we're here now to help you improve it before you start." Can't ask for more support than that.

The end result was a pretty major change to the semi-structured interview protocol. This didn't surprise me at all: Honestly, I really didn't like the first one I had written. The feedback during the defense discussion was invaluable, and DC agreed. After we were finished and I watched them sign all the paperwork, DC invited me back to her office and we spent the next 45 minutes crashing through the edits of the protocol. SHE actually did the typing while I did the talking. Gosh she's cool. After that we decided to add a brief demographic survey that I'll have the participants complete prior to coming to my office for their interviews. I pulled together an Amendment for the Committee on the Protection of Human Subjects and submitted these new things to that office later in the afternoon. All wrapped up in a nice bow. Not really, it was wrapped up in an inter-campus envelope, but I'm just being figurative.

As I was driving home, I had a sudden urge to start packing up my house, in preparation for our move. Wait a minute, I need to do these minor things like SCHEDULE THE INTERVIEWS NOW!!! Oh yeah. :-)

IMPORTANT MEETING 2: Moose's Individual Education Plan for 2007-2008.
This is the meeting where the SCT teachers, therapists, preschool coordinator all come together with us to set goals and objectives for his schooling next year. He will start kindergarten. We're technically a year late, but that's really not a big deal. It was good of these folks to spend the time with us, especially since we're writing this for the new school district in the new city. We didn't finish today, so we'll finish things up next week.

OK, I'm off to officially invite participants to join my dissertation study (at long last) and then it's bedtime. G'night.

Writing and Holiday Preparation

I cranked yesterday, thank God. Got lots of writing done, and am attempting to do the same this afternoon. In the past hour or so I've only written another paragraph and done a bit more moving around of other paragraphs. I guess this is part of the whole deal. It may never end, but if it does I've certainly come much closer to it in the past couple of days.

I also have the warm fuzzies I usually experience preparing for the winter holidays with Wife. We decorate the house a bit, play some of our holiday music that we only take out in December, that sort of thing. We sang "O Come O Come Emmanuel" at church this morning, which reminds me of college and fun times singing in the Christmas Carols & Scripture concert each year. No doubt about it, it's Advent out. I do enjoy this time of year.

It's funny: I now associate these Advent weekends with the time when I hunker down and write final papers till my wrists hurt. For some reason, today's afternoon solitude in my home office/prison is actually adding to the warm fuzzies. Well that's sort of messed up, isn't it?! But, this is my fifth December in a row doing this sort of thing, so it's becoming sort of a tradition, I suppose. And I actually don't mind it this year - it's that "do or die" time of year with my academics. Not that anything academic could really ever KILL me, but, well you know what I mean. Life's pretty simple right now: I just have a SHITLOAD of work to do in the next two weeks.

Guess I should get back to it, then. Just had to share these weird thoughts & feelings of "comfort & joy" along with fervish writing. I am SUCH a nerd.

Thanksgiving is Next Week?

I shudder to think that we're already nearing the time when seeing holiday decorations is appropriate and not too early.

I was out of town at the end of last week and into the weekend. It was a stellar experience, truly one of the highlights of my doc student career. I attended a conference, well more of a workshop, that explored creating a new research domain around the notion of creativity. The focus was on participation in the arts when in college: right up my alley. And I'm making a pretty major connection between creativity and some other concepts in my dissertation, so this was a WAY COOL experience. I have much more to say about it, but I'm not yet ready to share those thoughts here.

Now I need to synthesize all this information and get the damn lit review done. I think I'm almost there, and I meet with DC on Friday to get my first round of feedback on the first 20 pages I gave her a few weeks ago. Since then I've written another 15 pages or so, and hopefully that will increase by a few more pages between now and Friday as well. Gotta get these thoughts out of my head and get the literature cited.

The looming Thanksgiving date is a bit daunting. If I don't finish the proposal by the end of the year and start collecting data next semester, then I'll either need to change my entire topic or wait an entire year to collect data: I'm attempting to research seniors in their last semester of college: um, that sorta starts in two months. I don't want to wait a year.

I suppose things could be worse. As far as I know, I'm not dying anytime soon from some unknown disease (except maybe Wife may wring my neck if I don't get this done soon). But I am so sick of having this hanging over my head. Just want it done.

I'm glad the weather has finally turned cold. Makes me want to hit a pub and drink several thick beers with friends and wife. There's no time for this, I realize, but it's what I like to do on rainy cold grey Midwestern days like today.

Wait, it's only 10AM and I'm thinking about beer? This is bad!

The Deadline Loomethed and Passethed

Earlier today I turned in a draft to CPA Kim, the one who works across the hall from me and is helping me find the extrinsic motivation to kick ass on the proposal. She gave me an "incomplete," which was appropriate, but I was grateful for the deadline to actually make myself progress. Being accountable to someone else (funny word choice in "accountable," since she's a CPA) (I digress) is what made all the difference.

She moved the deadline back to next Wednesday, the day before I go out of town to confer at a conference. I now have only two sections left of Chapter 2 to write before going back and trying to make better connections between the sections. The goal is to have the two sections written before the end of the morning on Wednesday. Shouldn't be nearly as tough as the first portion I've already completed, because these last two sections deal with areas I've already read about. The first two sections involved exploring some new territory. I anticipate doing some editing on the plane to & from the conference and in the late evenings at the hotel.

"It" is getting easier. Finding the inner energy to get this done and not take it so damn seriously is how I'm defining the "it" in this case. The light at the tunnel's end is getting brighter each day, and I think that's my main motivation at this point. I can practically taste what life will be like when I'm done. That sort of sounds pathetic, because it seems these last four plus years are culminating into an attitude of "just get it done!" Not sure I like that too much. On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot better than sitting around and basking in academic masturbation, i.e. having great thoughts but making no progress whatsoever. Tee hee.

"It's Friday out," and I need to finish up a project at work before going home to mow the lawn/rake the leaves. Just thought I'd get this thought out of my head before the day's end. K, bye.

Looming Deadline

With the exception of the post from last Tuesday that just went up, I realize I haven't written in a while. So, hi.

A work colleague, who has already finished her higher education profection, is wonderful about checking in on me just about each day to help me be accountable that I'm actually getting things done on the diss. I'd say it's working. I turned in about 20 pages of the diss to DC on Monday. It's a large portion of chapter 1 and a medium-sized portion of chapter 2. Sounds like I'm ordering fries: I'd like a large please! Oops - digression. Anyhow, that experience was sort of scary in some ways, but cathartic in others. At long last, the feedback loop has been opened. I won't hear from DC for a while, but knowing she has a good chunk of the first two chapters is making me more comfortable with the possibility of sharing it with other colleagues I trust. Feedback would be a welcome change.

Anyhow, said work colleague from the preceding paragraph has set a firm deadline for me and another doc student for a draft of the entire proposal, or dissertation chapters 1-3, on her desk at this time one week from today. This is a good thing: I need the extrinsic motivation (even though it's "weaker") to fuel the stronger, more crucial intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Will I ever again be able to write something without citing it (Harvey & Katz, 1985)?

Guess I'll be focused this weekend in my on-campus office. Oh joy. But it'll be worth it if I can actually get something done by next week. Perhaps I should start chapter 3? YIKES!!!

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum Press.

Harvey, J. C., & Katz, C. (1985). If I'm so successful, why do I feel like a fake? The impostor phenomenon. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Defining the Bricks

I guess I never realized how technical the literature review construction process is. Had I realized this earlier, I may have completed this chapter long ago. Oh well: such is the learning process for me. I need to experience something to really learn about how I'll handle it.

I enjoy thinking in the abstract, but for some reason my confidence level with synthesizing constructs between works of literature has been low. Horribly low. Perhaps I'm a slow reader and felt behind others in during my time in coursework on making these connections. However I'm usually able to meet, and dare I say exceed, expectations when it was time to write papers, take exams, and so forth.

What's odd is that when embarking on a paper or other writing project, I first feel more comfortable writing about something straightforward and technical. Perhaps it's the "check it off the list" factor. When I've written something technical, there's a logical beginning, middle, and end, and when complete I can check it off the list.

However,when writing papers for courses, there was usually the assumption that the professor had already read most of what I'll be citing in the paper. There was very little need to be detailed in the literature review process for smaller papers. Otherwise I'd receive a comment from the professor like, "I already know this! No need to explain it here!" So instead of writing down the basics and editing them out later on, I would procrastinate on papers because I wouldn't know where to start. I would try to be conceptual right off the bat, though I'd rather start with the technical and move toward the conceptual. That would always throw me off kilter till I actually got into the writing process.

In my mind, the dissertation literature review chapter was this huge wasteland of philosophy and theory, connected by bits and pieces of literature that I'm supposed to be able to recall off the top of my head. Now I realize it's silly to think this way. After reading some other dissertation lit reviews and considering the audience of a diverse committee of professors, I realize I can (and NEED to) include the details. As a result, I am flying through this chapter now, and it's due to the fact that I'm building the foundation of it brick by brick with summaries of literary works, many of which I've already read, some of which I have not. Even my reading rate is speeding up, however, because I have a direction. The process is pretty technical right now, and I like it so far.

I really look forward to the next step of being more conceptual, though, and I'm preparing for it. In the back of my mind, I keep asking myself, "why are you including this summary in here?" I take a few notes separately to answer that, knowing that later on I will need to go back, move the bricks around, and connect the concepts in a logical manner. That's where my favorite part comes in: being able to think in the abstract and use the basic concepts to bring out another idea.

Eureka, I think I've got it! Assemble the materials for building up the wall, but don't lay the bricks and fill in the mortar till later on. It seems so obvious now. I thought I would have learned this stuff before the 23rd grade?