I finished my prospectus (dissertation proposal) last week. Yay! The text includes over 30 single spaced pages of excitement. For all you non-doctoral readers out there, a prospectus is a blueprint of the dissertation. I have a chapter on what research questions Geraldine will answer, a chapter on why anyone would be interested in Geraldine in the first place and how she relates to other studies, a chapter on how I collected data to write Geraldine and a chapter on what each chapter of Geraldine will look like. There is also a timeline, an 8-paged bibliography of relavant work, and about 50 charts that will appear in Geraldine's appendix.
Surprisingly, it was relatively painless to write the prospectus. Dumbeldore wrote to me to inform me that her preliminary thoughts about my prospectus is that it is very impressive. She will have more comments in the weeks to come and probably a lot of critical questions. No feedback from Indiana, but I know he's crazy busy.
Now on to the difficult part: getting 4 professors to agree on a date and time to meet so that I can defend said prospectus. The semester officially ends on Sunday, May 20th. I was hoping to be able to defend by May 17th, but it seems that this might not be the case. I thought I only needed 3 professors on my defense committee, but as Dumbeldore is retired, I need a 4th person to serve as a critical reviewer or warm body. This person will preferably also stick around for a year for when I defend Geraldine to become Dr. Kelsie next spring (God willing). This is a difficult task as two of the professors are on dissertation defense commitees and MA defense commitees in the next two weeks. Indiana has a group coming in from Thailand, Dumbeldore has a book publishing deadline this month, and my third member has dates that don't match up with the others' free days. And my 4th member-to-be is serving jury duty. My previous 4th member is retiring and won't be sticking around/isn't interested in helping me and my other hopeful commitee member is also retiring. There is only one other professor in the department that I took a class with, but he is on everyone else's commitee, is on sabatical, and would not make a good person to be on my commitee because he has no interest in my topic. *ugh* I hope the 4th-member-to-be agrees and has a flexible schedule.
I think I have to give up my outlandish roadtrip ideas to the southwest to watch a solar eclipse on May 20th. Indiana asked me why May 18th would be a bad day to meet. First I told him that as a native of the northwest, I don't associate good things with May 18th (this is a Mt. St. Helens eruption reference). When he rejected this superstition, I admitted to wanting to see a solar eclipse because I am an astro-physicist in my alterego but stated that defending my prospectus is more important. He laughed at that and told me that defending my prospectus should be more exciting than a solar eclipse, not just more important. Apparently Indiana has never seen a solar eclipse or he would understand my temptation to leave town. I ended the conversation saying that I didn't want to drive through the states between here and the southwest anyways.
Conclusions? Now I get to wait some more.
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