I have a date! I'll be defending my dissertation proposal on Feb. 28th. At our institution, this is not a make-or-break moment, but more of a discussion that is (usually) pretty collegial. It's an important moment, but not as stressful as comprehensive exams or dissertation defenses. I'll email my proposal to the committee on Feb 18th. I think I'm ready for it; my friends who have been through it tell me I'm ready for it. I hope they're right. I have a bit of work to do on it before the 18th-- filling in gaps ("QUOTE HERE" and my favorite note-to-myself: "MAKE THIS BETTER"). Nothing too stressful, though.
Today I'm working on a proposal for a summer fellowship. All TAs are eligible to apply-- propose a project and perhaps get awarded $3000 to do it-- pretty sweet deal. I'm having a hard time describing my project (essentially the lit review for my diss) in 4 pages for a multidisciplinary audience. I can't just roll out the composition big guns and show how my project fills a gap-- b/c the committee doesn't care about comp big guns.
One thing that is helping is mind-mapping-- I'm using bubbl.us right now. I found it through Collin Vs. Blog, but I've been thinking about it for a while-- ever since Billie raved about it. It's not coming easily-- it's been a long time since I've tried to visualize my work in this way. I'm trying it out with this small project to see if it'll be useful for my diss project. If you have any insights or suggestions about mind mapping, I'd love to hear them.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Irons in the fire
Monday, January 29, 2007
The Calculator
Billie was asking me how I got through my procrastination. I'll write more about it later, but if I had this neat tool when I'd started, maybe I wouldn't have procrastinated so much!
If you're writing your dissertation, especially if you're just starting, may I recommend the Dissertation Calculator from the University of Minnesota Libraries? If you give it a start and end date, it generates milestones, which can be emailed to you. It does include such stages as 'getting closure,' that you might not think about when you make your own checklist, and it doesn't end with the defense. Here's a sample calculation using, roughly, my dates. If you're a methodical worker, this might be an accurate representation of the diss process, but for me it isn't really. It works well as a checklist, though maybe not an accurate calendar of dissertation progress.
(crossposted from my professional blog)
