I've accomplished a lot of small things in the last week. They don't make up a blog entry on their own, but if I combine everything together then maybe I will feel better about my progress with Geraldine.
First, I went to the Library of Doom yesterday and survived. That deserves a blog of its own, so stay posted.
Last week was full of applications. I had to re-apply for a TAship, I applied for a dissertation fellowship from the library and a dissertation fellowship from the graduate school. The TAship application made me nervous. I'm sure that I have nothing to worry about, but the format changed from a 1-page application to a 4-paged application. It suddenly made me sounds like I've been receiving funding from the linguistics department forever and that I'm not making progress. For the record, the department has funded me for two years, I am only in my 2nd year as a doctoral student and I expect to be done writing my dissertation next May. The new TA application form makes it sound like I've been here for 5 years and asks questions that none of the TAs here can answer (such as 'how many chapters of your dissertation have you completed?', 'what's the title of your dissertation?'). Honestly, my department doesn't even have forms to make things like chapters and titles official. My advisers have the last say on everything (as they are the ones who decide if I become a Dr. or not, thus making them happy must be my first goal), maybe they should have had a role in designing this new TAship form. Oh well. At least there was a spot to write my preferences for courses to teach next year. I hope that I get to keep teaching online, as it has been great for Geraldine's development.
The library fellowship was easy to apply for. It took me an hour or so to complete, essay and all. The committe will grant awards to more than one student, so I hope that I am competitive enough to receive it. If I happen to be so lucky, the library foundation will give me $5,000 to finish Geraldine, travel to archives, and present at conferences. In short, it would mean becoming competitive enough to have a chance at a postdoc or tenture track job once I'm done so that I don't get stuck lecturing for the rest of my life. With that written, I hope no one from the library has been reading my blog about how annoyed I've been with it... And if someone has, may they know that I go to the library daily and use its services enough to employ every student worker there. And, although I obviously didn't write it in my application, my research is awesome and the library should give me funding because Geraldine will join the books shelved in section P204.(enter library of congress code here).
My third application was for a dissertation fellowship from the grad school. I met Indiana last week after a building fire alarm went off. And NO, I did not pull the fire alarm in order to meet with my adviser (even though everyone keeps accusing me of doing so). As I exited the building with a huge stack of books and my laptop, Indiana mysteriously appeared and offered to carry my books to the library for me. He then bought me a coffee (he was disappointed that I ordered decaf) and told me to apply for a fellowship for $15,000. Our conversation went something like this:
Indi: You should apply for the dissertation fellowship.
me: Wasn't the deadline for that a month ago?
Indi: No, this is something different.
me: But it's for less money than I earn as a dissertator working for the department.
Indi: Where are your priorities? Don't teach if someone gives you money, finish your dissertation.
me: Hmmmm....
Indi: Think about it.
After having the afternoon to think about it, I decided to apply. Indiana told me that he'd work it out so I could be his TA next year for a smaller appointment to make up the difference in funding as well. It sounded too good to be true. It was. The next day I found out that the deadline was February 3rd, as I had originally suspected. Oh well. At least I finally came up with a working title for Geraldine: Cross-linguist tendencies and grammatical extensions of human limb nomenclature. That probably means nothing to anyone reading this, but I think it's a pretty good title. There is no colon : to add in a witty side comment and I used all of Dumbeldore's terms, so she will be happy. And if she is happy, Indiana will be happy. And if both of them are happy, my entire committee will agree and I in turn will also be happy. Yay!
Otherwise? I wrote a 100-word abstract for the conference I'm presenting at next month (often we write abstracts that are a page long only to later have to shorten them to 1/5th of what we submitted). I bought plane tickets so that I can party with Uyghurs and Uyghur-wannabes during spring break. I am planning another library trip to a different university library for next week and I have 127 languages in my database. I should come back from spring break ready to start my proposal. And what does all this mean? I'm right on track and my advisers can brag about me. :)
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