Dissertation update

Wondering how my dissertation is coming along? Wonder no more!

• This Saturday I will be attending a workshop at the Vanderbilt Writing Studio on revising the dissertation.
  
• I leave town Sunday to do data collection at one of my three sites. I should be back some time Thursday.
  
• Last week, I submitted an article based on my quantitative analysis to a journal.

Publishing a book

Here, go depress yourself.

Pseudonyms

One little detail about my dissertation I've been working on is pseudonyms for the colleges I'm studying. It shouldn't be this difficult, but I had to reject any number of schema. Numbers or letters implied hierarchy among the three. Colors carry too many connotations. It's hard to find common last names that aren't in use already (Smith, Jones, Brown - all taken). First names don't sound dignified ("Fred College"). Many things were just too whimsical.

So I've finally settled on tree names. Common trees sound rather dignified, have positive associations, and can't be readily rank-ordered. There are a few schools with "Elm" or "Oak" in their names, so I'm excluding those. Pine College, Maple College, and Birch College - I think I'm set.

Outline

Outline
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

I was never a fan of outlining. It was something we were made to do in school, and I know I wasn't alone in going back and creating ex post facto outlines when we were required to turn them in.

This changed a little bit in graduate school. No one demanded to see outlines at this point, but I tended to start off a paper by opening up a document, inserting page numbers (tip from John Braxton: Do this first thing so you don't forget), and then writing the following headers: Introduction, Theoretical Framework, Literature Review, Data, Methods, Results, Discussion - or some variation thereof. Conceptually, it wasn't particularly useful; it simply reflected the required components of a research article. If I was feeling particularly frisky, I might divide the lit review into something like "Historical sources" and "Case studies."

However, in the last few months, I've discovered that I love outlining and it makes writing so much easier for me. The thing is, by the time you sit down to write a journal article, there is not a lot of mystery about what you'll say. You know what your results are, and the conventions around scholarly articles demand compliance with a formula. So it's not as if I'm stifling creativity. This isn't Finnegans Wake.

(The photo here, by the way, is of my outlining breakthrough. An paper needed serious revision, and I was going through and editing when I realized it needed more than that. The outline on the left was the result.)

I tend to outline fractally; I start off high-level, and iteratively fill in more detail. At some point, when the outline runs several pages, I just fill in paragraphs to match the outline. There's practically no sitting there thinking, hm, what goes next? Because I already know. My writing has become so much more efficient.

Dissertating

You've seen those cartoons where something starts rolling down a snowy hill, right? It starts off slowly, then as it picks up snow it move faster and faster.

That's what my dissertation experience is like. For a long time, things were moving slowly. Selecting dissertation sites took a long time, because I had to contact very busy people. Then the IRB process went reasonably quickly - well, quickly given that I was doing it around the holidays. This week I began contacting my research sites to set up interviews, and all of a sudden I've gained a great deal of speed. One interview has been tentatively set for Jan. 29, although it looks like we may move it back a little.

I'm actually contemplating graduating in May, which is a little aggressive. At Vanderbilt, in order to participate in the ceremony, everything must be turned in and done by the end of March. My impression is that at most schools, you have a longer window, and you might be able to walk if everything was turned in but you technically have a later graduation date. Anyway, May might not be doable, but August certainly is.*

I just hope that when I come to a sudden stop at the bottom of the hill, the snowball doesn't fall apart.

* Barring the unforeseen. I could be beamed up by aliens or fall into a coma, you never know. I don't want to get over-confident and anger our alien overlords.

Updates

I went backpacking this weekend. It was supposed to be two nights, but we scaled it back to one because of the rain. I'll blog more about the trip later.

Today I went to a job talk and then to a MLK day event with Rita Bender and Bob Moses. Nope, it's not a holiday for classes at Vanderbilt, which it should be.

I got IRB approval today for the final portion of my dissertation - hooray!

How to work

In the last few months, I have been working hard on adopting a more efficient mode of working. Perhaps I shouldn't state this here, where any hiring committee can see it, but the transition to working independently was a rough one for me. I'm going ahead and saying it because this is true for most graduate students, although for many of them the transition doesn't really come until they take a faculty job* - and also because I am overcoming it. So after flailing around for a while, I think I've found a system that works for me.

The biggest adjustment initially was adopting something of an 8-5 work model. There are important exceptions I won't bore you with here, but in general, I'm on campus five days a week, and when I am there, I am working on school-related stuff. When I am home, I am not working on school-related stuff (the biggest exception being reading for class, which is allowed at home). I had always liked the flexibility of the academic life, but I had been carrying it too far. So: Structure is good.

I've also been reading a lot of Robert Boice and other writers on scholarly productivity. I'm not as resistant to his ideas as he says some flailing scholars are, not because I am some open-minded paragon**, but because (as one of his students said), "What I'm doing now clearly isn't working, so what is there to lose?" The biggest thing I've picked up from him is the idea of moderation. Don't wait for inspiration on a project, and don't binge on it. I tend not to work for more than an hour at a time on any particular task, with the obvious exception of meetings that last longer than that.

A final thing I've figured out is that I do better with different tasks at different times of the day. Writing is easy before lunch; in the evening, it's nearly impossible. I can read at any time of the day except after lunch, when even a bodice-ripper could cause drowsiness. The early afternoon is a good time for administrivia, mindless tasks, sending email, etc. So I structure my day around my body's clock.

The result is that I've been getting more done and feeling a lot less guilt.


*I work for two deans who don't have big grant-driven projects. As my adviser has gotten deeper into the world of administration, he's given me less and less oversight. And I think it's an interesting way to do things - better to struggle now than in year one of the tenure track.
** Although I am that, too, of course.

Weekend shenanigans

I went out to Percy Warner this morning and hiked the Mossy Ridge Trail, and I could really feel that the last few weeks have been light on hiking. I've been working out but not getting many trail miles in. There are some big hikes coming up, and I not only need to have strong muscles but be acclimated to hiking in the heat. My time for Mossy Ridge was 1 hour, 43 minutes, not great but not bad either.

Today the Peabody Professional Institute for Institutional Advancement Leadership starts, and since I am working this one I'll be busy the next few days. Tonight I have to start by eating barbecue ... tough, I know.

AERA recap

Here's the quick roundup of what I found valuable at AERA:

• Karri Holley: When you get an submission back from a journal, wait 24 hours (no less, no more) before considering the comments, and always revise and resubmit if possible.
  
• Frank Harris: Be politically savvy and cite relevant work by the editorial board in journal submissions. Aim to have one article out each fall, spring and summer.
  
• Kim Griffin: In relationship theory, there are three kinds of relationships: Friendship, where two people give and take; generalized exchange, where A gives to B who gives to C who gives back to A; and partnership, where two people both give to a third thing that rewards them.
  
• Bill Tierney: 1) Read a lot, and not just academic stuff. 2) Have fun. 3) Take risks. 4) Word hard. 5) Write well. 6) Demand the best of yourself.

Unacceptable proposals

I came back from AERA with a cold so I decided not to go backpacking with my friends but to instead stay home and work on ASHE proposals, which are due May 1. The first proposal I was very excited about and had already gotten a start on. Then as I went to work, I realized two things. One, it would take about 90 more hours to finish. Two, my failure to anticipate one minor detail meant my findings would be pretty uninteresting. If I had 90 hours to spend over the next two weeks, it wouldn't be on that. So it was on to proposal two. Data collection issues, foreseeable but even more serious than I anticipated, derailed it.

I feel like I'm a first-year graduate student again, back in the days when Dr. Goldring would box my ears for my research proposals (deservedly and metaphorically). I could have gotten a chunk of my dissertation ready by this point, but I was holding back for reasons that seemed valid but now seem like excuses.

Well, I know who to blame, and mostly, it's me.

Progressing

I lost about a day's worth of productivity this week when I finally got around to reinstalling the OS on my laptop. Six years worth of file crud was slowing it down. Now I have about 7 GB more free. Almost everything is reinstalled and working, although I haven't synced my iPhone yet. I need to figure out how to not lose my checkbook data when I do that.

I've spent the last day crosswalking the questions from a series of four surveys. That means making a big table showing how a question has changed over time, along with the question number to make it easy to look up. For example:

Sir Mix-A-Lot Survey
1985	1990	1995	2000
3) like big butts y/n	1) like big butts y/n	1) like big butts y/n	1) like big butts scale 1-5
4) can lie y/n	5) cannot lie y/n	5) have lied in past year y/n	5) have lied in past year y/n

I need this crosswalk so I can figure out which questions I can use for longitudinal analysis, among other things, for my dissertation.

So much for anonymity

I'm reading a dissertation that is a case study of one college. The author refers to this college by a pseudonym, presumably to protect its identity. However, at one point in the literature review he discusses another study that looked at eight institutions, one of which was the one he is looking at. The author of the previous study did not use pseudonyms, so in a direct quote our later author substitutes his pseudonym for the real name. Now all I have to do is go to the cited work to know exactly which college it is - although in truth enough clues are given in the case study that I could figure it out if I cared enough.

People! If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

I can't decide if the author just didn't think it through or if he is using the pseudonym as a reflexive tic because "that's how it's done in case studies." I've seen a lot of that. Bob Smith, who works full time at Albertson College of Idaho, titles his dissertation "A Study of Donor Intent at a Selective Private College in Idaho Without a Football Team." Then in his acknowledgments, he thanks his colleagues in the development office at Albertson. (Made up example alert!) Gee, I wonder what school he might have studied? The anonymity seems like a reflex here.

In a slightly different case, I read a book by a very esteemed researcher that used a pseudonym for its subject, and all it took was a quick Google search to find a school with those unique characteristics. Now the book was written pre-Google, but even at the time of publication it would have been simple to out it. The difficulty in this case was that the unique facts that enabled me to decode the college are essential to the argument he was presenting. Besides, the case didn't reveal anything damaging to the institution. I think he was making an educated gamble.

Many of the these attempts at anonymity seem so half-hearted, though, like putting on a funny hat and hoping nobody recognizes you. In fact, the hat just gets people's attention and causes them to wonder who you are.

The challenges of the guest teacher

I taught an hour or so in my advisor's strategic marketing class tonight on strategic pricing. This is good experience, because our program does not emphasize giving us teaching experience. But it poses some challenges that teaching your own class does not. Obviously, teaching an entire course is more challenging than doing one lesson, but teaching one lesson in someone else's class is more difficult than teaching one lesson in your own, I think. Part of it is that the class may have been designed in a way you wouldn't have chosen. They do different readings, or you would have organized the material differently.

The bigger challenge, though, is that the class already has an established dynamic. They know how much reading they have to do. They expect a certain level of (in)formality. They come prepared to surf the web or to do group work. If they like the professor, they could resent having you (especially "just a grad student") instead.

If you are a regular guest lecturer, there to tell your part in the thrilling exploit of the Tuition Scandal of '99, the pressure is off a little because you can be a talking head. If you're expected to incorporate exercises, use good pedagogy, and demonstrate your potential as a future colleague, a higher level of performance is demanded.

All that said, it's still far better to learn to deal with one class session at a time before attempting to design and teach a course all in one go. However, there are ways in which the dynamic doesn't quite replicate the full teaching experience.

Progress

Today I defended my dissertation proposal, and it was mostly a success. I have to make some revisions before they will sign the documents, which isn't unusual, but the revisions don't involve substantial changes to data collection or methods - they're more about organization and theory. And I don't have to schedule another meeting. So, hooray.

Update

Yesterday morning I went to a special Thanksgiving yoga practice consisting of 108 sun salutations. I wasn't sure I could make it through, even with the breaks we were promised every 27 salutations; after all, after 10 at the beginning of an ashtanga practice, I'm already tired. To my surprise I made it through the whole thing, without having to modify the salutations, but even more surprising is where I am sore. I figured my arms would hurt from chaturanga (it's like a push-up), but instead it's my hamstrings that are suffering.

I spent the rest of the day eating, hanging out, and watching Four Christmases. (More amusing than I expected.)

The other big news here is that Wednesday I turned in a chapter of my dissertation to my writing group.

ASHE

Before news about ASHE gets any staler, here's the report I promised.

The first time I went to ASHE, I was excited to go to all kinds of sessions, even stuff outside my interest, just to see what was going on. By my third ASHE last year, I had a pretty good grasp of the kind of work being done, and there were a set of people I looked forward to seeing.

This year the dynamic shifted yet again, because I am on the job market. My anxiety level was heightened as I wanted to make a good impression on search committees and find out the scoop on jobs. Also, I had a series of meetings to go to instead of just sessions.

Hopefully, next year I will have a job and not have to worry so much about trying to impress, but it seems that as times goes on people spend more time in meetings and catching up with friends than they do attending sessions.

AERA

Exciting news! Our proposal for the annual AERA conference (held in April in San Diego this time around) was accepted.

Day three

Success!

Don't worry, I'm not going to keep posting this forever. Three days is a good start, I figure, enough to be the start of a habit.

Two days down

Hooray for productivity.

Day One, Year One

Yesterday I attended a dissertation writing workshop run by Robert Lucas. The focus of the workshop was on getting writing done, not the format it should be in or what a dissertation is. His biggest recommendation was one that, if you've read any advice on the topic at all, you've heard before - write every day. (You can write six days a week, he said, for at least half an hour a day.) I guess I was finally ready to hear it because this morning I got up, went straight to my computer, set my iPhone for a half-hour timer, and went to work. This was incorporating another of his suggestions - set aside a specific area to do dissertation work. I've been sitting in my living room a lot, so my desk has now been reclaimed as dissertation space.

The dilemma I will face in a day or two is that at this point I'm not ready to write the dissertation every day. There is too much in the way of data collection, etc. between now and then. I could use the time for other dissertation tasks, such as taking notes, but his system is really one for becoming a productive academic writer overall, not just writing the dissertation. (Writing can include revising, brainstorming, drawing diagrams, what have you, but it's about output, not input.) Besides, writing is something I can do well first thing in the morning - surprisingly, given that I am not a morning person. So my plan is to move on to work on one of the articles that's "in progress" on my CV after this chunk is done.

One day hardly constitutes a victory over sloth, but I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't started today, the chance of there being a day two would be exponentially lower.

Area Woman's Weekend Ruined By Dissertation

I've had a little hitch in my dissertation progress, particularly frustrating because resolution of it was beyond my control. My chair was finally available to talk about it today, so I jumped at the chance. (Doing so actually meant missing a doctor's appointment - but it was a minor check-up on my ankle, not cardiac surgery.) Even luckier, my adviser wandered in halfway through. The upshot of the meeting was that I need to write up a particular document by early next week.

"What are you doing this weekend?" my chair asked asked.

"Well, I was going to go out of town."

My adviser piped up: "Stay here and get this done."

"I can - although my friend might be disappointed," I said.

"Is she in graduate school?"

"No."

"Then never mind her."

It was a joke - at least the part about my friends. Not the part about staying home this weekend.

Motivation deficit

My motivation (and hence my productivity) has been wavering lately; I'll get one good productive day in, only to slack off the next. So I'm really trying to get back in the saddle again. I wanted yesterday to be productive, although I knew that my three scheduled meetings would get in the way of it. What I hadn't predicted was the downpour that soaked me from head to toe. Guess one should always check the forecast, but it was sunny when I left the house. I ended up having to change and deal with the blisters that were forming from wearing wet socks. (I already had a few from hiking this weekend; now my feet are a FEMA-level disaster.) Luckily my yoga clothes were with me; of course, I looked as if I was going to pop into downward facing dog at any moment.

However, I managed to get a reasonable amount done. The trick is to keep this up for multiple days in a row.

Dissertating

I see I haven't yet posted on what my new dissertation topic is. So, in a nutshell, the dissertation will be on the effectiveness of boards of trustees at private colleges and universities.

Good news

The emails went out with ASHE acceptances and rejections, and one of my papers has been accepted. (I say "mine," but I'm the first of four authors.) I think it was the strongest of the three submissions. So thanks to Vanderbilt's generous travel policies, my trip to ASHE this fall will be paid for.

Advice

One of my birthday presents was The Academic Job Search Handbook, third edition. Since it looks like I'll be on the job market this fall, I figured it might be a good idea to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm the kind of paranoid person who feels much better having done something official like read The Book, no matter how much information I've absorbed through other channels. So, hooray, official information.

And this is after the yoga helped considerably

I have spent much of this week feeling behind. I'm supposed to be concentrating on my dissertation, but everything else keeps popping up. And I have no right to complain, because it's all stuff I've agreed to do.

• I'm not working at this week's institute, but there are tasks for the next one, because I'm the coordinator for it.
• My chair has paid me to do some research, and I'm behind where I'd like to be on that.
• I'm supposed to be writing a book chapter.
• There are three papers I need to revise and submit to journals.
• Oh yeah, the dissertation.

All of these things are either things I've promised to do or am being paid to do, so it's difficult to say no. I think my weekend plans are about to go up in smoke, because otherwise I'll feel more guilty, and get behind, and at least one person I owe stuff to will be rightly aggrieved (which one, take your pick).

Sniffing out a dissertation

I may be closer to a dissertation topic now, thanks to a meeting with my chair yesterday. (Conversation not guaranteed to be verbatim.)

The Chair: Do you have any interest in x?
Me: Actually, yeah. I thought about it but didn't go too far because I assumed data would too hard to get.
The Chair: X is large enough that you should be able to get it from somewhere. And I can hook you up with Contact Y, who is a big cheese of x.
Me: Well, OK then. Bring it on.

The nice thing about x is that it's not studied to death, but it is important to the administration of higher education. There's a real opportunity for good work there.

I am being a little coy about what exactly x is until I figure out more specifically what I am asking - hopefully that will be soon.

Thanks, I'll look into that

Yesterday's post, by the way, was not meant in much seriousness. That is, it was perfectly accurate, but it was not a plea for sympathy. It was simply the quickest thing to post in response to a complaint that I hadn't been posting.

Over the past few weeks I have gotten a great deal of advice on my topic, some of it solicited and some of it not. Most of it has not been particularly useful, because every person brings with them a set of assumptions about how a dissertation should be done. But the way person A does a dissertation has so much less in common with the way person B does a dissertation that it's not useful. It's like telling a baseball player, "Now, get back in the game, and I really want to see you running with the ball." Now you might expect that this comes from friends and family who know only a little about getting a PhD, but it comes from faculty as much as anyone.

Before I started a PhD, I assumed that all dissertations (within one field, at least) would pretty much be the same. At the very least, there was some bar of quality that every dissertation had to meet. I quickly learned otherwise. Essentially, every doctoral student who reaches the point of defending a proposal can complete a dissertation if one can motivate oneself to do it. The committee won't stand in the way. Faculty have very different expectations for students, based on their assessment of the student's capabilities and career goals. I'm not going to get into whether that's fair; it's just the way it is.

Faculty also don't agree on how to approach the topic. One professor told me it didn't matter what topic I picked; the important thing was to pick the quickest thing I could and go get a job. Another told me the topic was the most important part of the dissertation; this person had chosen something they really weren't interested in, and it had taken years to shake off the association with it that they were growing sick of.

Finally, there are considerations of departmental politics that constrain me in ways people outside the department would have no reason to be aware of. Topic X or Approach Y simply aren't on the table if I want the backing of my faculty.

I'm in the department I'm in, so there's nothing I can do about that last point. When I chose my committee, and in particular my advisor, though, I made a commitment to approaching the topic and methods in a certain way. I chose to play baseball instead of football, so to speak. Yet when football-approach professors suggest something, they assume I'm playing the same game they are, even when they know who my coach is. Finally, regarding the level of expectations, at this point it is always possible to lower them, but not so much to do the reverse.

The point is that the most well-meaning (and even very expert) advice really isn't helpful here. The only people who are much help are my committee, and even they can't pick a topic for me. (Actually, they could. Asking them to do so would be the quickest way to lower expectations.) And I've been talking to people and bouncing things off of them, thinking it would help me, and it hasn't much. I appreciate everyone's willingness to help, of course, but in the end they've been better for moral-building than practical solutions. That's how it's supposed to be, I guess, at least in the social sciences. One student, going mano a mano against the void to wrestle something out of it.

Update

Still no dissertation topic.

Reboot

For everyone who has asked, yes, I've been thinking about dissertation topics. I have come up with several ideas, some of which are even viable, doable, and credible. None of them I am passionate about. I've been trying to decide whether that was because they really didn't excite me and spending a year (or more) on them would make me miserable, or whether it was because, as Great White teaches us, we are once bitten, twice shy.

Then this morning I read an article about cubicles. It made me think, this is the kind of thing I want to write. Not that wish to write about the rise of cubicles in the corporate world, precisely. At the end of the article, I laughed to see that it was in fact based on a sociology student's dissertation. Well, there you go; it can be done.

Part of the problem is that I feel as if I had been preparing to write the discarded dissertation for well over a year. I was well marinated in the topics it would examine. When it came time to come up with a new topic, I decided to throw away part of that preparation and looked for a dissertation that maybe used the other part, but that more importantly met a set of criteria such as a) can be done in a certain time frame b) is not about x or y or z c) will position me on the market in a certain way. That's no way to find something you're passionate about.

It's time for a new approach. I'm going back to the topic I was ready to abandon. And I'm looking at it, and the things around me, and not thinking instrumentally. We'll see what turns up.

Rejected dissertation topics

You can be forgiven if you thought I had dropped out of school based on the content of recent posts. Nope; I'm still here and looking for a dissertation topic. So far I haven't chosen one, but here a few I've rejected:
Action research on boundary spanning roles: Take a fundraiser, a donor, and a professor on a hike around the Sewanee perimeter.
Auto-ethnography on the process of choosing a dissertation topic: Pros: No problems getting access to the data.
Content analysis of my dissertation: It's like a mirror reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror reflected in a ... whoa.
Factors predicting alumni giving at a private university in the South: Turns out it has been done. Who knew?
The topic doesn't matter, but the title doesn't have a colon: I realized I would never get a job that way.
Cosmopolitans vs. locals in the tenure process: Findings suggest that drinking too much isn't good for tenure bids, no matter whether you consume fruity Sex In the City cocktails or regional microbrews.

Setbacks

It looks as if I have to rethink my dissertation. This isn't a big surprise - I knew my original idea might prove impervious to research, but my committee and I decided to attempt it anyway. Now I either have to scale way down or pick a new topic. It's probably going to be the former.

There are two opposing ideas about dissertations. In one model, "the best dissertation is a done dissertation." In the other, your dissertation is your journeyman work piece, showing what you are capable of. Most dissertations lie somewhere in between; after all, a dissertation won't pass and therefore be done unless it reaches some level of quality. If only one person responds to your survey, you can't say, "Oh well, I'm gonna write it up and be done!"

A good metaphor for the dissertation is to think of a jeweler making a ring. (What do I know about gemology? Nothing.) Part of the process involves choosing a stone - first the type, and then the specific one. Shale isn't hard enough, for example. You could use granite; it's tough, but you can't see by looking at it how strong it is. There could be a flaw in the heart of that particular stone. So diamond is good, or emerald, something both strong and easily evaluated. But a good stone is only the start. It has to be cut and set - no super gluing a hunk of rock to a ring! This is where "the best is done" part comes in. It's OK if the stone could use a little extra polish or maybe the setting is plain. But what you clearly have is a ring, and it's well-made.

What I seem to have done is planned to use a terrific type of stone that is now unavailable. I could use a cheap imitation, or choose another stone altogether. This may be taking the metaphor too far. In any case, I now need to pick a new dissertation topic.

Good news

I am excited (and honored) to report that I have been selected to be a Vanderbilt Center for Ethics Fellow next fall, along with two of my fellow department members. The program offers a small stipend in exchange for meeting with each other and examining the ethical implications of our dissertations. While money is always nice, I'm also looking forward to have the opportunity to talk through my work with people.

No rest for the wicked

ABD, well, that means it's time to get back to work!

Actually I've gotten a fair amount done this week. I had a very helpful meeting about my dissertation topic, although it doesn't sound so helpful when I explain the upshot of it was ... to schedule another meeting. But really, it was useful. I've also been working on three, er, two proposals for ASHE. I'm submitting three; one is already out of my hands, the one with my advisor. Another one is a four-author paper that even if it doesn't get accepted at ASHE has another audience it will probably play to. And then the last one is my paper from my contemporary theory class. Tomorrow's goal is to submit those proposals (they're due at 10:59 p.m.) and to submit a dissertation fellowship application. Friday's goal is to eat pancakes. And, um, that probably won't take all day. Let's pull some things off my "long-term to do list" and my calendar:

• order new beaters for mixer
  
• buy peanut butter at Whole Foods
  
• buy summer foundation at Sephora
  
• avoid thunderstorms
  
• send some PPI emails
  
• go to the gym or yoga
  

ABD

After five years of graduate classes, I am finally done with taking classes forever. Technically, I suppose I could still flunk a class, since grades haven't been posted yet, but that's extremely unlikely. So - basically - I'm all done. To show for it, I have this pile of notebooks to figure out what to do with. All done but the sorting.

And I have a shelf almost full of books. There are still spaces, though - whoops. But I'm done! Whee! Happy dance! For tomorrow, we dissertate.

Random

• Terence posted some pictures from college. My first though was, wow, they look so young! Then I realized that just means that I am getting old. So I pulled out my college photo album and found something weird. The girls look dated (clothes, hair), but they don't look so young. The guys, they look like boys. I don't know what it is, if it's some sort of mental filter and a guy would see the opposite.
  
• Summer is in the air. The temperature is 80 and humid, and I'm already complaining. The graduation tents are going up. And I went to my last class as a graduate student today. Whee!
  
• Papers. Gotta focus on writing papers.

1/3 there

One paper down, two to go. So far my time allocation scheme seems to be working. I had through yesterday to finish my first paper; today, Thursday, and Friday to finish the next one; and the weekend for the final paper. It doesn't make for an exciting week, however.

Now don't think that I'm trying to do an entire paper from start to finish in three days. I've done all my research and written an outline. This is literally just the writing - getting what's in my head and in my references into the paper. As I start to fill in the outline, though, I'm finding that there are points that need to be eliminated, added, or rearranged. (This will be less true of my final paper, which does original data analysis, and thus follows the time-honored form of intro-lit review-data and methods-results-conclusion.) Eliminating points in particular worries me, because my papers always tend to run short.

3 days to write at least 25 doubled-spaced pages. Except I write single-spaced, so that's about 13 pages. Let's say five pages a day. I'm at 2, so back at it.

All circuits are busy

End of the semester
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Publish or perish

Our courses can be roughly divided into two kinds: methods and topics. In methods, you learn how to use a technique (surveys, regression, path analysis); in topics, you learn about a subject matter (access to higher education, politics of education, classical sociological theory). Topics classes in particular tend to require a final research paper as the major part or sole component of the student's grade. In our program, there is a definite push to think of each paper as potentially publishable. (Another school of thought holds that each paper should be written with the dissertation in mind. That doesn't work well in our program, but why is another post altogether.) The benefits of this are straightforward - you build up your CV from the beginning, making you a stronger job candidate. There are also side effects, however, that I'm not entirely sold on.

First, you have less control over the topics of your research. There are plenty of topics that someone earning a PhD ought to have taken a course in, but this covers a much wider territory than your average professor's research agenda. Your conference presentations and publications may suggest a jack of all trades, when you really want search committees to know you're interested in a specific area. Second, this really limits the kinds of research you can do. If you're using "human subjects" (which includes interviewing people) and want to use the results for anything other than class, you have to get it pre-approved by the institutional review board. This is often nearly impossible within the confines of a semester. This mostly leaves quantitative methods, generally using pre-digested data, again because of time constraints. So your CV reflects a certain set of techniques, not necessarily your preferred ones.

I'm thinking about this as I start to cast a critical eye on my CV in preparation for next fall's job market. Conference proposals for a major conference are due in a few weeks for the most important conference in my field. It is held right when applications are starting to flood in to departments. What does my CV say about me?

I think it documents well my interest in the topic fund raising, probably at just the right level. No one is looking for someone exclusively focused on it, the way they might want someone who studies college student issues. It overemphasizes my quantitative bent, as I'm more of a mixed methods type, but I think the nature of my dissertation will clear that up. What my CV fails to do is show my interest in organization theory, because that is not a topic that is emphasized in our department. My work in it has mostly led to class papers that aren't particularly publishable. For example, last semester I wrote a paper for sociology that analyzed the treatment of Max Weber's work in the first 25 years of Administrative Science Quarterly. I can't imagine that any other journal would be interested, and ASQ needs a big anniversary to wax nostalgic.

So it would be helpful to do something in that vein for this conference, but I have nothing in the pipeline to use. I'm co-author on two proposals, both related to fund-raising, and something solo would be nice. Now I think I could submit the paper I'm writing for my access to higher education class, but the topic is not really where I'm trying to position myself. (It is noteworthy that I did manage to find a way to write a paper using organization-level data for a class where individuals are usually the unit of interest.) Another classmate indicated interest in collaborating with me on it, so I may go ahead and use it mostly as it stands for this conference and then work with him to expand it.

Classes march on

I had one of those weird classes today where apparently my reaction to the texts was different from other people's. A lot of folks, including the professor, said one reading in particular was very difficult. Now, no doubt it wasn't an easy piece, but I have found a lot of other pieces this semester more challenging. (This isn't an underhanded way of praising myself for being smarter than the other kids; there have been other readings where the situation was entirely reversed.) Moreover, I found it very helpful in clearing up some other stuff we've read that I've never quite gotten, whereas some folks - and this isn't too strong a word - hated it.

This kind of thing is interesting when it happens, especially because it's not a case of where the reading was clearer to one person because it fell within their specialty or because they have experience with the method. Sometimes a student just finds a work unexpectedly difficult, or really engages with something, and it seems like there is no good reason.

How to write a dissertation abstract

I spent a significant part of today reading dissertation abstracts and far too much of that time being frustrated. Why? Apparently writing a good abstract is much harder than it seems. So let me tell you how it should be done. Now, I've never been on a dissertation committee. I've never even written a dissertation. But I don't think that matters much. How much attention does a committee pay to an abstract? They probably don't even read it, since they already know what your dissertation is about. This is a plea from the user end, as someone who has to read abstracts.

• You have a limited number of words. Sure, you can make it long, but ProQuest will shorten long abstracts, and that's how everyone will find your dissertation. So you might as well keep it short and control what readers see.
  
• Don't use those limited words to tell us why research on, say, cranberries is important in general. Chances are, we found your dissertation by deliberately looking for info on cranberries.
  
• Don't give us details of your sample selection. Yes, we want to know if it was a case study of one cranberry bog, if you used the Cranberry Bog Data Set, or if you limited it to female-owned bogs. Maybe tell us your survey response rate. But that's all we want at this point.
  
• Don't tack on a final sentence that tells us more research is needed. Trust me, we fully expect to see that in the conclusion, so it can go unsaid for now.
  
• Don't use the future tense. Your dissertation exists, right? Tell us what it does, not what it will do.
  
• Keep discussion of the research questions brief. That's because ...
  
• ... we should be able to figure out your questions from reading what you found. This is what most readers are really looking for - your findings.
  
• Do include your methods, albeit briefly. We want to know if you use regression or Delphi or ethnography or laboratory experiments - we don't care if you used MICE in Stata on missing data.
  
• Don't include a bevy of citations. It's one thing to tell us you're comparing actual cranberry cultivation practices to the Ideal Method described by Schnauzer (1997) but another to recapitulate your entire lit review.
  
• Finally, if your chair tells you something different from this, do exactly what they say.

Friday's review

I started the day off by earning demerits - sleeping in until 8:30 and not really getting going until 10:30. I also decided to reapply Friday to different purposes, but not nefariously. It's supposed to be a "my stuff" day, but what I had planned to do was a project that requires a lab computer, and I knew it would be hard to get access to. So if I moved that to Saturday, Friday could be used for something else, in this case, my access paper at the library. That lasted until 4 p.m. Then home to dinner and the gym, followed by some class reading for next week.

That concludes my week of updates, although not the work I have to do. It was pretty motivating to know that I would embarrass myself in front of the entire internet if I goofed off. Of course, that's not a long-term strategy.

Thursday in review

Thursday morning was a grab bag of stuff. I printed readings, registered for summer credits (zero dissertation hours - yes, you're registering for nothing!), sent some emails, updated PPI stuff, yada yada yada. Then I couldn't face my paper, so I worked on my annual evaluation form, which is due on tax day.

Went to class in a torrential downpour. Then I stopped by the library to pick up an interlibrary loan needed for my access paper, only to discover the book couldn't be removed from the library. (I'm pulling the data for my paper from it.) So I spent some time working on it, finding it wasn't as complete as I expected and getting frustrated. I went home to mull on it and surprised myself by actually writing up a chunk of that paper - the data and limitations section. I know it's not my priority paper for this week, but I figure paper inspiration is rare enough to be seized whenever it happens. Then I went to yoga, still sore from Tuesday's class.

I really should take a post-yoga shower, but I need a cup of hot tea first. Maybe I can finish The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915-1940 tonight. It's a library book, and someone recalled it. Pfft.

In which we talk about our fellow students

Setting: The office. Officemate's phone rings.
Officemate: Ha ha.
Me: What's so funny?
Officemate: Oh, I'm just updating Mr. Brilliant on sports.
Me: He's awake? (Being a notorious nightowl.)
Officemate: He only sleeps about 3 to 4 hours a night. That's why he works 10 to 12 hours every day, and has time to swim every day and go to clubs and stuff.
Me: Why do you tell me this? How am I supposed to compete on the job market with people who only sleep 3 hours a night?

Accountability on Wednesday

I work at home Wednesday mornings. I wrote up some notes for an article I'm responsible for regarding tonight's class and wrote an outline for my stratification paper. Then I went to Costco to pick up some new contact lenses. (I really wanted to go to Cost Plus and DSW, but I was disciplined. Also, I didn't have time.) At noon we had a PPI meeting and then lunch at the Commons. I spent some more time working on Project Snowball. I'm on the fence about whether that one is "my stuff" or "advisor stuff," because my advisor is the first author, but I'm responsible for getting this particular article out. So I guess it's both. I also had a brief meeting with my officemate about a paper we're writing. Basically, we agreed to put it aside until May, since we're buried under end of the semester stuff and I have to get ASHE proposals out.

Then at 4 we had class, except today we took a field trip to Fisk. When I got home a friend called and we chatted for a while. I've spent the rest of the evening reading. After a certain hour, I can't do anything else - I can't write at night, and I do Stata better during the day. So, reading for this paper. Woot. And laundry. Double woot.

Interesting point about outlining this paper: My original idea was promising, I think, but when I turned in my formal proposal, it had gotten vague and unfocused. So I've been thinking and reading, and when I wrote up the outline, I had a realization: "Oh - so THIS is what my paper is about." It's not that I discovered that instead of being about dairy cows it was about goats, but that my angle on dairy cows was that Jerseys in particular produce delicious cheddar cheese. (Metaphorically, of course.) That's one of the mysteries of the human brain - stuff rattling around in the subconscious is sometimes just ready to come out.

Tuesday's report

I spent half of this morning working on PPI stuff for my advisor and the rest of it doing reading for my stratification paper. Once again I spent some time chatting, but then I didn't take a lunch break. In the afternoon was my contemporary sociological theory class. Then I was planning to run to Costco to get more contact lenses, but I didn't feel like fighting rush-hour traffic, so I did some more reading before going to yoga. After yoga I read one chapter but was pretty wiped out, after two weeks of no yoga.

Score? I was reasonably productive, but I feel like I need to be writing my paper, not reading for it and thinking about it.

Monday's work report

Monday is a day I'm supposed to spent working on "my own stuff." (Which, you may be surprised to hear, does not mean reading novels, eating 85% Venezuelan chocolate, and getting ready to hike the AT.) So I spent the morning working on my dissertation, putting together a spreadsheet of contacts at the sites I'd like to use. Then I had lunch with my friend. Alas, after that I didn't get right back to work but chatted for a while with folks I hadn't seen since I left for AERA. You can decide whether that deserves demerits or not. I spend the afternoon working on one of the three projects I have coded as current priorities, Project Snowball. (These three are projects I'm trying to get ready to submit for publication.) There was a talk I'd planned to go to but skipped out on - not so much to get work done but so as to avoid dealing with parking.

I don't consider the evening part of the time dedicated to "my stuff," so I've spent most of the evening working on one of the three papers due in a month. I've decided to focus on my stratification paper this week. And I went to the gym. The cardio room isn't well-lit, so I couldn't read or anything. Sure, the weight room is lit up, but I've never seen anyone try to read and bench press at the same time!

You might think I'd feel pleased. "Gosh, self, you were productive today. Good work." Nope. Instead, I feel guilty because if I can be this productive, why can't I do it everyday? It's not as if I was working at an unsustainable pace, 20 hours a day with a caffeine drip and a chamber pot under my desk.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's thrilling report, where Turducken sends out some emails, works on a stratification paper, goes to class, and does yoga.

Ticking

I have looked at my calendar, ladies and gentlemen, and the end is nigh. The end of the semester, that is, so rather than repenting and getting my affairs in order, it's time for me to finish up three papers and get stuff done like taxes, my annual student review, etc. (One may repent not getting more done before now, but it doesn't accomplish anything.)

So I'm going to be a little MIA. Oh, sure, you can expect daily posts this week, but they're going to be daily check-ins of accomplishment, not anything you want to read. I'm going on a Facebook fast for the next seven days. That's right - I'm not signing in at all until next Sunday evening.

I'm not completely hiding out. For one thing, I have classes to go to. For another, I'm not programmed like that. I figure I can justify lunch with Dr. Prepared tomorrow because it very well might be the very last time I see her before Prepared, Jr. joins us in this world.

AERA in sum

About the conference side of AERA - I didn't do as much conferencing as last year in Chicago. At this point, I have a pretty good idea of what I'm interested in, and there weren't a whole lot of sessions of interest to me. However, I did see some good stuff. Also, my presentation with Mr. Kindhearted went pretty well. Our discussant was someone who always has good criticisms to make. He never says, "Wow, this paper was even better than sliced bread," but any critical remarks are helpful and fair. And if he thought our paper was dreadful, he would have said so - and he didn't. So now we go into the Revising For Publication stage. As far as my roundtable with my advisor, let's just say that not a lot of people are there at Monday at noon!

Conference paper session drinking game

For those of you who have never experienced an academic conference, here's what happens at a typical session. Usually four papers are presented. They run about 12 minutes each and are accompanied by PowerPoint. A chair is responsible for keeping it on time and introducing everyone. The discussant then critiques each paper (he or she usually has read the whole paper in advance), and then there are audience questions.

So, with that in mind, here is the rules for the Paper Session Drinking Game. Take a drink each time:

• A presenter refers to an earlier paper in the session
  
• A presenter cites someone from your institution
  
• The discussant clearly knows nothing at all about the topic or methods
  
• An audience member asks a "question" that is a plug for his/her own work
  
• A paper is clearly different from the proposal that was submitted
  
• A presenter disregards the time limits
  
• The chair doesn't show up
  
• An audience member who arrived late asks a presenter to summarize their entire paper
  
• The discussant uses his/her time to plug his/her own work
  
• A presenter reads a paper (and is not a historian)
  
• Three or more co-authors do a presentation together
  
• A PowerPoint slide has text too small to read
  
• The papers have nothing at all to do with each other
  
• There are technical difficulties with the laptop/projector
  
• A presenter runs low on time and has to cut slides in the limitations or conclusions

Stuff happens

This week has been all over the place. I found out that two grants I had applied for both turned me down. One I knew was a long shot (1 in 30 are chosen). Actually, I was surprised I didn't feel worse - I was just mildly disappointed. Maybe it's because I don't need the money, since our program is pretty generous. I also found out I wasn't being considered for something else I applied for. But then I also got an unexpected accolade.

Mostly I've just been frantically preparing for next week's conference. I leave tomorrow night and I'm still not ready. Actually, the low point this week was probably when I started to pack and had to figure out what clothing fit. Answer: not enough.

You win some, you lose some ... but what you lose usually aren't pounds. Ha.

Questions

For our stratification class this week, we read Barbara Reskin's 2002 presidential address to the American Sociological Association in American Sociological Review. She talks about research on social stratification and inequality and decries the trend that (she says) focuses on "why" without looking at "how." Without knowing "how," though, "why" tends to be just speculation. (There is, naturally, also research focused on "what" - does x happen?) As an example - mine, not hers - consider SAT score differences between black and white students. Observing the "what" is easy; white students on average score higher. But why? Is it innate genetic differences, as the authors of The Bell Curve would argue? Is it culture that discourages black achievement? Is it a biased test? One could consider any of these hypotheses, but to test them we need to think about how bias or genetic differences would result in score differentials. Does the gap exist on other tests? How do black kids raised by white parents perform? Can we detect class or racial bias in the test by doing a textual analysis? Etc.

I was struck by this article, because as far as I'm concerned, "how" is the most fascinating question of all. "Why" is pretty good, too, but "how" is what gets me up in the morning. What, where, when, and who are all incidental. My dissertation is actually a combination of why and how. I want to look at mechanisms up close; even demonstrating a correlation between supposed cause and effect is too remote for me, because the nature of the link itself is still a black box. (A lot of very clever economics boils down to this - testing that y occurs only and always when x happens - but the actual operation of x is unobserved.) How can people be missing out on this great big vat of fun?

I'm realizing that this causes me some difficulty in doing research, especially in a short time frame, as in a class paper. Generally one doesn't have time to collect original data in that situation, and "how" is often best approached by case studies, historical records, or multi-level data that is rarely predigested in the right form. Moreover, there is less data than usual on the particular questions of interest to me - fundraising data is notoriously hit-and-miss. If you want to know how much was donated to College X, you can probably find out, but that doesn't tell you how it was raised.

With that in mind, my topic for my Access to Higher Education class paper has completely fizzled, and now I have to find a new one. It was a historical question, and the data turned out to be harder to find than anticipated. The professor suggested a specific topic there is information on, but it seems to me to be what Boyer would call "the scholarship of integration," and what my CV needs is original questions, if not necessarily original data. Other questions that come to mind bore me - or at least they're not interesting enough to get me through the tremendous amount of time a research paper requires.

The bad news is I need a paper topic fast, I feel like I'm behind, and apparently my projects are always going to be grandiose. The good news is that I know what kind of question I'm looking for.

Back on the job

Spring break is officially over, and today I was back on campus to get work done. My advisor had re-committed me to devoting Mondays and Fridays to my own work (not homework or work for him), so I tried it today. It went pretty well. Aside from a few minor tasks, I managed to focus. (When an assignment has to be walked over by noon to a professor's physical mailbox across campus, what are you going to do? You're going to do it, Monday or not.)

I spent most of the day editing an article. It's been rejected twice. Ironically, the place I'm submitting it this time is probably the best fit. To meet their word count, though, I needed to shave about 1000 words off. I went through it twice; some of the cuts were low-hanging fruit and others were more difficult. The funny thing is, I had thought it was decently written, but this time around I was dissatisfied with my writing. Shortening it up strengthened it considerably. It probably needs one more pass through, and my dissertation chair has offered to read it in a few days when he gets back from a trip. After he looks at it, I will heave it once again into the submission pile.

I also spent some time running Stata for a conference presentation that I'm turning into a journal article. I did this on my laptop, but it's a huge mound of data, and for the future it would be better to use the library's computers. I just have to find out when the lab is reserved and when it's free.

Adieu briefly

First, some big news: Today, Ms. Prepared became the first person in my cohort to defend her thesis (and, of course, to pass)! Her defense went really well. So from now on we'll have to call her Dr. Prepared.

Tomorrow I will be leaving town for spring break. Details will be posted after I return.

Out of my rut

I've been suffering from a case of unmotivationitis lately. The difficulty is distinguishing serious unhappiness from the natural vagaries of graduate student moods - because you need to know the root cause to treat it effectively. (If simply saying, "Hey! Work harder!" was effective, there wouldn't be a problem, after all, and graduate students would be marvelously efficient.) I think I figured out where my slackitude is coming from, so I'm partway to a cure. I also had a chat with my advisor today, and he was helpful, although not in ways that were entirely expected.

The biggest issue is that I'm making the transition from "doing stuff for other people on deadlines" and "having to do stuff on my own for long-term rewards." It's easy enough to get things done for classes or grant deadlines. It's harder to prioritize journal articles and research projects that are due whenever they're done. After all, the rewards (and penalties) for getting classwork done in a timely manner are pretty immediate. The rewards from getting a journal article submitted are more long-term and nebulous ... someday you will be considered for more jobs, tenure, respect, etc. As you can see, though, long-term doesn't mean unimportant! I think I may have come up with a strategy to help me get going again, and I threaten to keep you updated on it.

Savings

I went to a thrift store in the neighborhood today, looking for retro Tupperware and random household goods, but instead found a book I should really read for my dissertation - at the low, low price of $1.49. Hooray for good deals.

Happy V-Day

This upcoming weekend is PhD recruitment weekend. Tomorrow I'm picking some potential students at the airport and then attending the dinner. On Sunday, my practicum partner and I are giving a presentation on our research. In between, I'm going to brunch and seeing a movie. (I also had two invites to go caving and a chance to go to a roller derby. What is this - nothing at all happens one weekend, and the next everyone goes crazy?)

Of course, I also have some of that pesky homework, but not as much as this past week. For one thing, I had to lead class today. I was surprised to hear that lots of my classmates found this week's readings very boring - I had picked this week because I thought it was interesting. Well, mostly - reading Blau and Duncan can be incredibly dry. But there was some org theory brought in, which I always like. Apparently I was alone in that. I gave everyone chocolate, though, in honor of Valentine's Day. Grad students are theoretically above food bribes, being so much more sophisticated than undergraduates. I'd like to think it was my scintillating questioning that kept them awake - more likely it was the caffeine in the truffles.

People are going places

One of my grad school friends just got a pretty good job offer and is contemplating taking it. Another friend in between jobs, trying to figure out what to do with his life. One of our soon-to-be alums has starting working in a state policy job. Another has a more or less guaranteed job waiting for her upon completion. My sister is applying for internships for her third year of seminary. A friend in one of our masters programs is looking for a post-graduation job; others are looking for summer internships. And several PhD students I know are on the market, looking for faculty jobs. People are moving; people are getting married; people are having babies. People are getting divorced. People are buying houses.

I know some students take forever to get their PhDs - we're talking 8, 10 years, and not about people who are going part-time - and I can't imagine that. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had gone straight through school and leaving was a leap into the unknown. As it is, I'm starting to get an itch to move on. I'm not yet impatient, but I feel ready to start dissertating, to make progress under my own power. And that's conveniently where I'm at.

So tomorrow I'm meeting with my chair, to talk about my timetable for defending my proposal, some theoretical issues with my topic, and how to submit a conference proposal when the deadline is prior to any data collecting. And next year, it can be me moving places and getting jobs.

Conference timing

AERA finally posted the conference schedule. I was disappointed to see that my advisor and I are presenting at 12:50 on Monday - essentially, right at the beginning. This means I have to leave Sunday night rather than Monday morning in order to be there on time, which means an extra night in a hotel. And I suspect most attendees won't be there yet, either, meaning turnout will be low. But I guess someone has to present in that time slot - and better that it be our roundtable than our paper session.

One of those days

I went into campus this morning with a specific project to work on. Trouble was, it took much less time than anticipated. I hadn't brought anything else to work on, at least anything of any urgency. I ended up doing some reading for a term paper, which wasn't exactly a waste of time, but it wasn't a high priority either. Then my afternoon class covered microsociology, which just isn't something that comes naturally to me. I love reading Erving Goffman, but as I learned in discourse analysis last semester, focusing on that level of detail is not my top skill. Afterwards, I met some peeps for happy hour before going to a club meeting. All in all, I didn't get much accomplished today.

Tomorrow is another day, right? Just like Scarlett O'Hara said.

Whew!

I turned in my Institutional Review Board application and mailed off the grant application today. Hooray! For the first time in quite a while, I feel like there isn't any immediate deadline hanging over my head. Before these deadlines, it was comps - before that, fall class papers - before that, another grant and AERA conference presentations.

I'm sure soon enough I'll feel pressure again. I need to defend my proposal in a month or two, write term papers for this semester, and submit conference presentations to ASHE. And without specific deadlines, I have to revise some papers for journal submissions. For the moment, though, I'll enjoy the feeling.

I'm even taking off tomorrow to go caving. Nothing academic, all day long!

Time out of joint

There is supposed to be an order to the graduate student career. One comes in as a naive new student and spends the first semester feeling overwhelmed. A few semesters later, one gets used to being overwhelmed. After a year or two, one takes an exam or series of exams that allow one to progress. In some programs, one writes a masters thesis. One day, one finally finishes classes. Then one starts The Dissertation. This involves getting a committee, then writing a proposal, then getting the proposal passed. After some indeterminate amount of time, involving collecting data and writing things, one successfully defends the dissertation. The final step happens when one goes to graduation and realizes, "Damn! I should have gone somewhere where the regalia includes a sword!"

Somehow my chronology has become discombobulated. It's not really the delay in passing comps; I'm on schedule to defend a proposal when I had planned to. It's just that right now I'm working on all this stuff that feels like it ought to happen after the proposal. I'm applying for a grant (and I applied for another one last fall) for the dissertation. I'm filing an IRB form for my data collection.

And at this point, I don't have anything technically approved. Theoretically, my committee could say to me, "No, we don't like the direction you're going in. We'd like to see more of a focus on the role of the lemur in promoting intertextuality in antebellum Georgia." They won't, mind you: I've discussed the project with all of them and they're on board. That's a good thing, because I know precious little about lemurs.

And the word is:

I passed my comps!

Boring side of research

Friday, per my advisor, is supposed to be "my writing" day, which apparently doesn't actually have to involve writing per se - simply devoting it to my research rather than class and whatnot. So I intended to spend a good chunk of the day working on this IRB application. IRB forms are a pain unless you have done a lot of them. They're hard to get into a state of flow with, too - just as you get into writing the 250-word abstract, it's over. Then you have to figure out what they mean by "performance sites."

I tried to work on it this morning but wasn't getting anywhere. I'd stop to check the internet, think maybe I should do homework instead, find I was missing the first page of an article, go back to the IRB, give up ... Finally I decided I needed to eliminate as many distractions as possible, so I took my laptop to the coffeeshop. I still had email access but couldn't get distracted by my readings or the realization that I need to clean the bathroom. I made progress. Eventually, though, I decided I could only do so much IRB-ing in one day.

A little bit a day and I can get it done.

Research goes on

The dissertation had been pushed to the back burner for a while, but today it came to life again as I looked at a funding application I had planned to submit. It's due in a week and a half. And I need to have an IRB application in before I submit it.

Guess who is going to be working on an IRB application for the next week ...

Grinding

I'm supposed to be working on a three-five page theme for class that's due at noon tomorrow. I finished the book days ago and know what I want to say, but I'm just not in the mood to write. That's not unusual for the evening, but I couldn't get motivated this morning, either, and that's usually my best time for writing.

I have some projects and reading I wouldn't mind working on, but due dates first, right?

Update: It turns out that all the problem required was the judicious application of the right background music. If only all problems were so simple!

Exam anxiety

Taking comps is traumatic, so you're only going to get one post on the topic, or you'll feel as queasy as I do.

The way the econ comp works is that a week before the exam you are given a specific article on the economics of education. At that point, the goal is to study it in great depth. You look for everything you don't understand and figure it out, look for holes that could change their findings, and try to guess what questions will be asked.

The exam itself was 7 questions, three of which were multi-part. We had an hour. This makes sense, in a way, because in the first exam, we had three hours to cover three subjects, although I allocated a more than proportional time to econ that time around. We actually ended up with about 10 extra minutes this time.

The first four questions I felt pretty solid on, but I've learned that I am less able to trust my perceptions when it comes to econ than to other topics. Back at IUPUI, I was sure I had flunked our first test in the microeconomics class. I was certain! And then I got it back, and I don't remember the exact grade, but it was at least a B, so nowhere near flunking. And after the comps first time around, I wasn't confident about my econ performance, but this time my uneasiness was right.

I skipped to question 7, then. Six and 7 were "what-if" scenarios. I think if there was an area our studying was weak on, this was it. We were so focused on understanding every footnote and every table that we didn't think, "OK, what scenarios could make their findings invalid?" And we've been through Dr. Ballou's stuff before, so we should have anticipated it. Then again, the possibilities for that sort of thing are infinite, right?

Then I went back to question 5, and just as I was working into it, we were told we had 10 minutes left. I ended up spending three minutes on the last question, and I can tell you that was a flub - I only had time for gut reactions with no explanations. I never run out of time on tests, even when I do badly, but all three of us worked up to the last second. One would expect, of course, that those of us who are poorer at the subject would take longer, but I'm not entirely sure it was just us versus the length of the test. (As there was no control group of highly economically competent grad students, this is just conjecture.)

So now the tests have to be scored. A 1 is a flunk, and 2-4 pass. It's entirely likely that Dr. Ballou has already marked them, but he has blind copies, so he wouldn't be able to tell us how we did. (Unless we all passed, right? So that means we probably didn't.) If a test gets a 1, it goes to a second reader. Judging from last time around, the second reader is unlikely to give it a different score. My two fellow test-takers also had to retake the methods exam, and it's possible they won't tell any of us anything officially until all results are in.

And now, we wait.

Big day

Tomorrow at 1 p.m. I retake my econ comprehensive exam. I don't know how long it'll be before we get our results - the grading professor is pretty on the ball, and he only has three tests to grade. (Then again, it could always have to go to a second reader. That would mean the first prof didn't pass it, though, and the second isn't likely to either.)

Random thoughts about this semester

1. In this, my sixth semester, I have my third and fourth classes taught by female professors.
2. I am taking a class on access to higher ed and another on stratification. Of course, they are delimited differently, but there is a great deal of overlap. Still, the approaches of the two courses are entirely different - the first has a policy orientation, the second a conceptual orientation. What is taken for granted varies wildly.
3. My classes are requiring a lot of small writing assignments this semester.
4. Best part: Three papers, but no exams.
5. I had to buy 15 books.

Buy "Racial Formation in the U.S." and get T-Rex FREE!

One of my class books arrived yesterday with a "freebie fun pack" the store apparently sends with all orders. I now posses an "E-man" comic from 1984 and two trading cards. I don't know what sort of collectible the latter are, except that they feature a dinichthys and some scavengers (which appear to be pteradactyls). Gosh, I'm having more fun already. Bring on the dinosaurs!

This semester seems to be off to an odd start. As I told my officemate the other day, "I know I have stuff I should be doing, but I can't figure out what." That was only half a joke; I'm having a hard time settling in to the the new semester.

Maybe it's because instead of being end-loaded, this semester starts with a bang - next Friday I retake the economics comprehensive exam. Maybe it's because this is my last semester of classes, and I feel as if I'm supposed to be focusing less on coursework and more on research and the dissertation - and yet I have classes I'm really interested in this semester. Maybe I just goofed off too much on break.

Late-breaking news

Update: I now have pre-class reading for all three of my classes. Now I just have to wait for the books to arrive for the last class so I can do said reading.

She's baaaack

I'm back in Nashville and doing super-exciting things. Yesterday I rearranged my bookshelf, hoping to defy the laws of physics and find sufficient room for my school books. Today I sorted the backlog of mail. I've also been reading. Remember back in the day, when you showed up for class on the first day and got the syllabus, and if you were lucky you got to leave early? Even though everyone used email when I was in college (in the pre-Blackboard era), profs didn't expect work pre-class. Now, the semester is really longer by one class period than in the good old days, since a lot of professors assign readings to be done by the first day, and sometimes even written work.

Still a process

The latest issue of The Review of Higher Education came in the mail this week, so I unwrapped it and flipped it over to see what was in it. I realized that I was reading the names of the authors instead of the titles of their articles. I'm pretty sure I didn't use to do that.

Yesterday I was talking with a first-year masters student, a bright guy, and he was talking about a class he took this semester. He said that when given the name of an author they had read - even someone they read an entire book from - he couldn't put the name together with what he (in this case) wrote. A stray doctoral student in the class, however, had no problem with this.

That flashed me back to my masters program. As an undergrad, I generally didn't remember the names of the scholars we read. (Since I was an English major, yes, I remembered Shakespeare and could tell him from Angela Carter or Charles Dickens. But when I read for my other courses, unless it was a big name - Descartes or Darwin - it was, as far as I was concerned, Some Dude.) When I started my masters program, it took me a good year to realize how important it was to remember that X said Y, rather than that Y is a fact. I had to consciously pay attention to names.

Now, I'm glancing at journals, scanning to see if the articles are by anyone really famous, anyone whose work I tend to enjoy, or any acquaintances. Then it's a second glance to see what the topics are.

Yes, they can rebuild us. They have the technology. Nerdier than we were before.

Getting close

Yesterday evening I had some PowerPoint slides to finish and a paper to polish, both for this morning. I had also promised to go caving, although if things got dire I figured I could back out. Things did not get dire, however, and I managed to do it all, even though it was a pretty late night.

This morning I turned in the paper and presented with my research partner. Now, all I have left is a paper for Monday, with three whole days to work on it. (We have class Monday morning, but that just requires showing up.)

The end is near.

Accomplishments and backslides

My sociology exam is now behind me. I came out of it with a massive headache (as well as with the conviction that I performed reasonably on it), so I treated myself to a peppermint mocha. I have been trying to swear off disposable paper cups, but vice got the better of me this time.

On the way home, I passed a cyclist I had also seen on the way into campus. I thought to myself, here I am destroying the earth in two ways, as I emit carbon while holding an unnecessarily dead tree, while this guy is being virtuous - and burning calories rather than consuming empty ones. The guilt!

Back to work, now, on an assignment due tomorrow morning, so I can go caving later this evening.

Whoo!

One class down!

Checking in

What do I still have to do this semester?

• For discourse analysis, create a presentation and present a version of our final project; do one final analysis.
• For sociology, finish studying for the test, take the test, and write a paper.
• For economics of higher ed, finish the paper, create a presentation, and present it.

I'll be done with econ first, as everything is due Tuesday. Sociology and discourse won't be done until a week from Monday.

Too soon

This year's job market leaves me depressed. It's too good - there are too many postings, including several I could really see myself in. Back in my first year, one professor told me the market was really opening up and that when I went out there would maybe be five jobs to apply for; this year, I've already seen more than five. Presumably, most of these places will find what they want (at least the most desirable places) and not hire again next year. Looks like the blossoming of the market happened too early for me.

Of course, a lot of these new hires will be upgrades, so next year Southwest State University will have an opening after someone moved from there to University of Flagship. But these jobs aren't particularly desirable, at least from our faculty's point of view. (Mind you, our track record for placing students doesn't reflect faculty ambitions, but this has to do with student ambitions as well as the faculty. They can't make someone who wants to do institutional research apply for a job as an assistant professor.) Nevertheless, they aren't necessarily jobs I am enticed by, either.

I have this fear that next year every job opening will be either be somewhere I don't want to go or for a kind of scholar that I'm not. Or there will be one fabulous job and every single fresh PhD and assistant professor will be vying for it.

Frightening things

1. I was working out my schedule for next semester, and my advisor wants me to reserve Mondays (and possibly Fridays) for writing - not necessarily my dissertation, but other papers I am working on. It's an interesting idea but it scares me a little bit. I can write all morning, but I have a hard time writing in the afternoon. I may have to redefine writing to mean researching for papers or something after lunch. We will see.

2. The other day I was getting dressed and realized that "my posterior's getting big and my posterior's getting bigger." (Sorry, Beastie Boys.) It's that time of year again when my Nordic genes prepare for the long, dark winter ahead. Also, I've been exercising less without the goal of being fit enough for Mount Saint Helens driving me. I need to get back into balance, which is easier said than done during the Christmas season.

3. There isn't a number three, unless you count getting through the end of the semester stuff I'm not excited about, which is due before the stuff I am.

You've been advised, part II

So if my dissertation is being driven by a central idea, what is that idea? I'm been thinking through a bevy of ideas, and I feel like I can't quite get there. Here's some of what I've been tossing around.

"Elite institutions have interests identical with those of elite individuals." A hundred years ago, Harvard wasn't selective. They didn't turn down a lot of students. Instead, it was in a mutually supportive relationship with America's elite, especially the Boston elite. The right folks applied and were admitted, and most everyone else didn't give a rip. This solidarity thesis may have been true back in that day, but it hasn't been for a long time. When Columbia and Penn started admitting more Jews, their relationships with the upper class eroded, according to work by Farnum. That they allowed this to happen suggests the institutions had some interests at least that did not coincide with the elite as a whole.

Well, how about a thesis about change over time? Because I'm not doing a history. Whatever changes have taken place are a backdrop; I'm just analyzing the current situation.

"To those that have, are given." This is accumulative advantage, or the Matthew Effect, made famous by Merton. Certainly I am looking at institutions that have and keep getting. But I'm not explaining why everyone else can't keep up; I'm looking at the active process of keeping at the head of the procession. Accumulative advantage may state that organizations do whatever it takes to stay ahead; it doesn't say why one course of action rather than another is what it takes.

Stratification is too broad, but I think I can discard it without delving too deep. Colleges are stratified, sure, but stratification theory is about how individuals behave. It's why the stakeholders in my dissertation are making the demands on colleges they do. But I don't think it describes how colleges decide to respond.

If you're talking about responding to stakeholders, you're talking resource dependency. That is, organizations respond to the demands of those who have resources, be those fiscal or regulatory or something else. The problem with this theory is that no matter what an org does, it can be explained by resource dependency. Therefore, it's not predictive. You can't model how a college decides to respond to one set of stakeholders or balance conflicting demands. I am arguing that colleges are in fact actively balancing contradictory constituent demands, but this can't tell me in what proportion, or why it just doesn't give up one set of stakeholders. For a theory, RD is strangely atheoretical.

I'm only starting to read about status systems, so maybe I don't know enough about them yet to really say much. I have a feeling there could be something there.

I'm thinking about consumption and how you know a good is high status. Some things are consumed only by elites. Say, yachts. Whatever interest most people have in yachts, we aren't buying them. Do you know yacht brands? I don't. Other goods everybody buys, say, cars. Here we can identify elite brands even if we don't purchase them ourselves. We all tacitly know that a Ferrari is better than a Kia. Part of that is price, but is it all? Doesn't part of Ferrari's status depend on being known as a status good? Kia could jack up their prices - even hire a Ferrari designer - and the end product might cost more than my Cinco, but I bet it wouldn't compete with a Ferrari.

So a high-end product in a mass market, I think, needs both scarcity (whether artificial or natural) as well as name recognition. (I'm wandering into Veblen territory here.) Colleges, back in the day, did not produce goods for the masses, and so were like yachts. Today, with the massification of higher education, they do, and are like cars.

Being scarce isn't hard for the top colleges to do - just limit admissions. Being broadly identified as an elite product is. Price is a signal to some extent, but just like in the souped-up Kia example it isn't enough. How does Ferrari stay on top? It makes cars that perform well. What is the equivalent for a college? It has to be known to perform well, which I think for a college doesn't mean it teaches students a lot. It means it offers entree into elite society. Frankly, that's really the only good an elite institution offers that other colleges don't. That's the hard thing to maintain that drives a lot of institutional behavior. The concessions made to elites, such as an advantages in admissions, are not because they have identical interests or because colleges need their fiscal resources, but because good relationships with elites are what they are selling to all comers.

But I know nothing about consumption and luxury goods, except what I know from The Theory of the Leisure Class, which is a century old. Somehow I don't think scholars have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs on the topic.

Wait, is this what my dissertation is about? If so, I had no idea until right about now. How can my central, driving question be entirely subconscious? I don't even know where to look in the literature. And if that's my argument, why aren't I just looking at legacy admissions? Why am I adding development admits too?

I need a luxury good right about now. Preferably a strong one with a little umbrella in it.

You've been advised, part I

Today I had a meeting with my dissertation chair about another paper I'm working on (the one that was panned for being too long when it wasn't) and it turned into a meeting about my dissertation. He was really pushing me to conceptualize it as an example of a specific theory - as an example of how the world works that just happens to be taken from education - rather than as a dissertation about education.

In the good old days before I entered the Ivory Tower, I would have said all research questions were created equal. Oh, curing cancer might beat curing bruises from a useful standpoint, but "finding info about the world and how it works" was all intellectually equal. Right, not so much. Facts about the world, no matter how useful, that are isolated facts and not part of a system, just don't rank as high. That's why "practical" disciplines such as education have less prestige than "pure" disciplines.

So if you're doing research in education, you can conceptualize your question several ways.

One, it is a practical question of "does X work?". Education gets browbeaten for asking these atheoretical questions, but they have their place. Let's say one of your state senators decides that in order to improve education, all class sizes need to be 10 students or less. If his bill passes, the state is going to spend a lot of benjamins to reduce class sizes. So asking simply, "Do smaller classes lead to higher test scores/higher graduation rates/etc.?" without any kind of theoretical grounding is a reasonable question. One reason to criticize this work is that it doesn't lead to any guidance on how to answer follow-up questions. If you find that reducing classes sizes from 20 to 10 does make a difference, would it also be equally good to add a teacher aide to each class of 20? Would reducing class sizes to 15 have the same effect? What about lengthening the school year? Does it matter for all grades?

Thus, you can introduce theory. In alumni giving research, some folks draw on psychological theories of attachment. Alumni wish to identify with a school they perceive as successful, thereby boosting their own projection of success. Your hypothesize that alumni increase their giving if their alma mater rises in the U.S. News rankings. And if you find out it does, you can go on to test whether making more PR noise about your rise in rankings further improves giving. Great, now you're grounded in theory. But your work doesn't feed back into the work on loyalty and attachment. It's pitched at others in education, not to psychologists. Your central question is about education fundraising, not about psychology.

Your final alternative is to take a theoretical proposition and use education as a test case. Suppose you are interested in stratification. In a nutshell, stratification theory posits that we all want our kids to have at least as much status as ourselves. The trouble is, the elite have more resources to use as inputs on their childrens' behalves. Thus, no matter what the rules of the game are, those who already have win. So you might posit that if education is a pathway to the elite, those who are already in the elite will set the educational bar higher for the next generation. If a college education used to be enough to enter the elite, ambitious non-elites would start to get college degrees. But now the elite is getting bigger; maybe a masters degree will come to be seen as a minimum. Education is your test case here; your next project may well be on how the elite controls the Social Register.

Even at a really excellent education department, like, oh, Vanderbilt, most of the work being done falls into the second category. At the end of the day, it's about improving education. I offer no criticism of this, and in fact I think it's what "the public" expects from an ed school. We in LPO tend to frown on the first category - my advisor made it clear long ago that my dissertation WOULD have a theoretical grounding. There is no or else.

So why was my chair pushing me towards category three? In part, of course, that's because his own dissertation was like that. It was fundamentally asking a question about a theory of political science. I don't think that's the only reason, mind you, but he didn't give a list of reasons. He did go further and suggested actively insinuating myself into the networks of where those kinds of questions are being answered. As my advisor pointed out, this would give me a whole other set of peers. (On the other hand, it doesn't really open up any more jobs. It's still a PhD in ed, and you don't get into a sociology department with that.) I am finding myself that most of the work I think is interesting is Category III work, and it's being done by people I don't know at conferences I don't go to. That alone is an incentive for me to follow his advice.

Furniture rocks

Last Monday I stopped into my office and noticed that, joy of joys, we finally got our filing cabinets. (There was a mishap with the furniture delivery at the beginning of the year.) So this morning I spent some quality time rearranging things, putting things inside my file cabinet, and generally sprucing up my corner of the office. And then I got a key for the cabinet. Now I can lock my belongings up when I leave and feel secure they won't disappear, even if my officemate isn't around to keep an eye on things.

All quiet on the turkey front

I've been somewhat heads-down the last few days, partially because I've had a cold. It's not going to kill me, but I've been sleeping a lot. So there's nothing very exciting to report. (Except I did go to the new Whole Foods today. I've never seen such an enormous Whole Foods. It's aisle after aisle of food porn!)

I also think that having the grant application and my conference presentations behind me has helped me be more productive on some end of the semester stuff. This is in part because they're just out of the way, but also because I was spending nervous mental energy on them. End of the semester projects, on the other hand, do entail a lot of work but are not novel. They don't induce the same sort of anxiety.

Next steps

OK, I'm over it. I don't have room in my headspace to let this reviewer take up valuable real estate, so ... moving on ...

I came back from ASHE filled with ideas and plans, as usual. Dr. Carter, who was the discussant on my event history analysis paper, had several good suggestions, of which I plan to use all but one. On the drive home, Ms. Prepared had a really excellent suggestion for a slightly different direction in which to take the paper. So now I'm more excited about a project I had gotten tired of. (I am not taking one of Dr. Carter's suggestions because the new direction obviates the need for it, not because it wasn't a good one.)

I also have roughly mapped out where the various projects I am working on need to go over the next year or so, with next steps, where to submit them, etc.

But - before I can do any of that - I have some homework to catch up on for this week.

Adding insult

The reviews are available for proposals for AERA. Two of mine were accepted and one was rejected.

Reading the comments isn't necessarily fun - they tell you what's wrong with your paper, and I'm no masochist. However, generally the comments are useful. Some make me think, "Right, OK, I should do that." Others make me think, "They're wrong about X, but I'm pretty sure that I was unclear. Time to rewrite." Some I disagree with and am willing to take the risk that others will agree with me when I submit elsewhere. Others are more complex or thought-provoking.

But then there is the occasional comments that makes you wonder if they were actually reading your paper at all.

I had one reviewer write, "This proposal is quite problematic for me. First, it appear to be too long and, thus, I do not believe that it is compliant with the baseline requirements for proposal submissions to Division J." The call for proposals says, "Provide a summary of 2,000 words or fewer (excluding references) for use in judging the merits of the proposed paper." Division J does not provide a different word count. My proposal clocks in at 1986.

Honestly, this makes me angry. It's rare you can say that a reviewer is clearly and unequivocally wrong. While it doesn't matter (this paper would have been rejected in any case), it is frustrating to see the one thing you know you did right criticized.

ASHE 2007

It's day 2 of ASHE. So far, we learned that Louisville is on Eastern time (which I should have known, since I've driven up and down I-65 enough times). I have a few pictures from the Vanderbilt reception, which I will post as soon as I get around to downloading them. For now, I have to go meet my editor. (Doesn't that make me sound fancy? In truth, she's the editor of the book I'm third author on. So it's not inaccurate to call her my editor, just misleading.)

I guess I have to start saying things like that, though. Apparently between being a second and a third year student a transformation occurred. As a second year, I was one of a large mass of mostly indistinguishable graduate students that were treated politely but with no special interest. Apparently now I am close enough to being on the job market - even though I'm not looking this year, I have started on that magical process that ends in "dissertation" - that I'm now quasi-scrutinized by many of the people I meet, but most particularly by other students on the market or soon to be. It's all friendly enough, but it's a weird feeling.

Academic conferencing

Tomorrow morning I head off to ASHE, where higher ed academics present research and have a general hootenany. This year it is in Louisville, so we're driving. Depending on the internet situation, I may or may not be posting. Wish me luck in my presentations on Saturday.

Better ideas

So I was being a bit of a smart aleck about that diagram. Actually, it was a good idea. I was finishing up my grant proposal and was very dissatisfied with the theoretical framework. Dr. McLendon had told me to elaborate on it, and I had, but it felt disjointed. There was some of theory A and some of theory B but I didn't feel like it tied together.

Then I decided to draw a model of what I thought was actually happening, and suddenly the framework made a lot more sense. I had to rearrange and write some more, but it was no longer random piles of theory. I thought - for just a moment - great, I would figure this out at the last minute. Then I realized, better the last minute than the next day, after I've turned the proposal in. Hooray for just-in-time production!

Whenever I have a breakthrough that seems sudden like that, I never know if it is really a new flash of insight, or if it's just stuff that's been simmering finally coming together.

Stop me before I apply to Owen

Ack, I just found myself drawing a diagram, complete with arrows. What am I, an Owen School of Business student? Help!

Proposing

Tonight I am finishing up a proposal for a dissertation grant. Only 6% of applicants are awarded the grant - but of course, all 100% of non-applicants are turned down.
At the very least, it is forcing me to put into words and think through issues. You know how something seems perfectly clear in your head, but you try to explain it to someone else or to formulate it explicitly, and you realize you were glossing over some bits of it? Yeah, I'm going through that. I'm also chasing down citations and beefing up my theory section. I tend to absorb theories and then report them back telegraphically:
org theory stop resource dependency stop stakeholders with different levels of salience stop
I need to slow down and explain these things, not only because that's better academic writing, but because in this case the readers could be in a totally different area of education - say, they study interventions for autistic pre-schoolers.

Synonyms for what I'm doing today

Editing, revising, polishing, refining, revamping, correcting, amending, strengthening, bolstering, improving, lengthening ...

... manuscripts, documents, papers, research, precis, proposals, findings, results, write-ups, synopses, articles, statements ...

for

... grants, proposals, conferences, committees, sessions, foundations, discussants, researchers, audiences, experts.