I realized today that my defense is less than 6 months away. That means that I have been a dissertator for 10 months and I'm almost 2/3rds of the way through this process of becoming Dr. Kelsie. I even think I could celebrate that idea right now, as I feel confident with my progress, my committee and Geraldine. I think Indy was right, after the data collection, checking and re-checking nightmare ends, writing the damn thing isn't that bad.
I just finished my first complete draft of a chapter and I am very satisfied with it. ( Oh, thank you, but you don't have to applaud). There were many times that I thought this moment would never come, but it has, and it feels great. I've been working on my methods chapter for the past two weeks or so. As I am presenting my dissertation research to a big group of scholars tomorrow in the library (part of my library fellowship), I figured the methods chapter would compliment my presentation preparations. I've spent time balancing preparing slides for tomorrow's presentation and writing sections for my chapter and it has been going well.
As I don't want to brag and would prefer to let everyone reading this feel better about themselves, let me know describe my organizational routine for writing this chapter. I wrote a lot and came up with new sections as I went along. That's no surprise though, that's how these things usually work. After I was nearly done writing everything I thought I needed to write, I read the methods chapters from three dissertations from previous PhD graduates from my university. I figure if they passed, I can just copy their organization. I realized that my chapter needed to have more "I will talk about this, then this, then that, then this and then I will tell you what I told you about" material to it. So I fixed that, and then realized that I had to re-order most of the sections of my chapter. First I printed everything out with department resources, then I started cutting and taping things together in a new order. Because everything in my chapter was numbered, moving it around was tricky. So instead of cutting, pasting and then forgetting what goes where, I opened a new document and changed the color of the font for each section. Section 1 was dark red, section 2 was red-orange, 3 was orange, and so on until I got to section 10 and used black. Not only was my chapter in a better order, it was pretty too! But then I changed all of the numbers in headings and tables and quickly changed the font back to black before anyone could walk into my office and make fun of my for my technicolored font fun. Yep, I'm still a dork.
As far as preparing for my library presentation, I gave a practice run-through to both of my classes on Monday. In the first class, half of the students seemed interested and the other half were falling asleep or texting. I then retaliated by giving the sleeper/texters an F for participation for the day and changed my slides before my night class. My night students seemed much more interested in my work, but after the first 15 minutes, their attention started to fade and I could see that I was losing them one by one. How to remedy the situation before tomorrow's talk?! I reworked my slides again and added more data, keeping Dumbledore's sage advice close to heart: talk about things that someone will want to share at a cocktail party. Help people feel smarter after listening to your presentation, even though I am the expert and they are not. Good advice, Dumbledore, thanks.
So, wish me luck tomorrow. I hope my audience doesn't resort to playing solitaire on their mobile phones during tomorrow's presentation. I'll re-read my chapter next week and e-mail it off for review afterwards. And in case you're wondering, the acupuncture is doing wonders for my stress levels, back pain and I've even been able to work out for 4 of the last 5 days. (Gotta look good under that big doctoral robe and hood after all). Over and out!
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