In print, at long last

Several years after I first thought of the idea, shopped it around, clarified it, did the research, wrote the article, revised the article, revised the article again, and fought with a copy-editor, one of my dissertation papers is in print(!) at long last. Yay, me!

On another, unrelated note, it really creeps me out to watch people lick the tops of their yogurt containers. Ew.

I Am Tired.

I'm nearly and I'm so tired.

Dissertation Stats:

Word count: 43069
Pages: 190
Citations: 124
Days of anxiety, existential crisis, sleeplessness, and lazyness: priceless, er, I mean, too many.

For my graduate school friends, some advice

A word to the wise: do not leave half of your dissertation for completion in the last month of your program. Even if you really really think you know what you're doing. It causes:

madness/lunacy (if you weren't already)
carpal tunnel syndrome
SBWS (staring blankly at the wall syndrome)
fear (for your future, your committee's safety, the horribleness of your diss)
loathing
existential dilemmas galore
tingling sensations while your body falls asleep (from crouching over 2 computers nonstop for hours/days on end)
etc.

Another tip, be nice to the administration, even if they are a bunch of assclowns. That is, until they sign off on your degree.

News update: it is now T-4 days for dissertation completion (hopefully)!!!!!!!!!

Dissertation Results

Hi everyone, I have been furiously typing and coding and analyzing. And now...I have results:
Hypothesis 1: reject the null!
Hypothesis 2: (drumroll...............) REJECT THE FREAKING NULL!!!!!!!

And as for all those other complicated "sub analyses" that I thought were such a good idea to tack on to my proposal..... let's just hope that my committee has forgotten about them. I sure have.

Progress Note

Ok everybody, I know it took me about six months, but I have finally updated my word meter progress on the left side of the blog. You will see that the first study is LONG and this doesn't count the extra 25 pages of references and tables and so forth. It's really too long to be publishable but I don't have to worry about that for ahile. Now I just have to get everyone to agree to the content... As for study #2, I clearly have a lot of work to do and I found ANOTHER mistake in my coding. BOOO!

It's nice to see some progress.

On a funny (actually not funny if one wasn't hopped up on caffeine and allergy pills) note, today I showed one of my tables to a Committee Member (aka CM)and it was deemed EXCELLENT. Even better, it was: MUCH IMPROVED, NICELY FORMATTED, CONCISE, and (my favorite) VERY TELLING. It was actually an outdated, older version of a table that I was just using to illustrate a simple point. I elected not to mention that it was actually the same version that CM saw approximately two weeks ago and derided as: AWKWARD, CONFUSING, POORLY FORMATTED, and LACKING the last time CM saw it.

Go figure.

Go figure.

I Forgot the "_"!!!!

So some massively good news today.

Today I got back 175 pages of output from the code I sent from undisclosed location offsite data management facility.

Wow! Data! Results! Testing hypotheses! (FYI, many of them are....NOT REJECTED!)

Ok so this whole process took a lot of back and forth and forth and back and confusion and pages and pages and pages of coding and lots of confusion, etc.

Unfortunately, upon looking at my output, I noticed that on page 1, in like the 5th line of code, I forgot a "_". A single "_". Which means that about 75 of my pages of output are...garbage.

Anybody who knows me knows that I am obviously not a detail oriented person. So why the hell am I in a detail oriented field? And writing a detail oriented dissertation?

The Post Doc Search Continues, Also I Don't Know What I'm Doing

The search continues... I had a phone interview yesterday for a post-doc position with a professor who actually understands my dissertation research (Whoa.) I will be traveling to his boring landlocked Midwest city to interview and give a job talk in late April. It could be a perfect fit. It could be a boring city.

Meanwhile in the dissertation realm, I have encountered multiple statistical and software roadblocks. Naturally, this led me to request help from my statistician as well as the statisticians affiliated with the software that I'm using. In response from the first, "I really don't understand it either." Um, ok. When pressed, I am told to do it every which way and hope that the results are the same. When further pressed for conceptual rationale for these odd methods, I am told, "Well...you are really the expert here." Um, what?! From the software statisticians, my plea for help results in this reply, "At present, we do not any general suggestion in the case of [complicated crap] with [more complicated crap]."

Great.

Just a prediction here people: I will do basically whatever I want. Later I will be told by my committee it is wrong and will have to re-do it all. Then, when peer review comes up, I will probably have to re do it all over, again.

The joys of dissertating.

Is It Cheating?

Is it cheating if I count my abstract and references when doing a word count for one of my dissertation chapters?

If not, I have 8511 words for chapter 2/study 1. Ultimately word counts are irrelevant. Especially because I am writing my dissertation in a manuscript format and ultimately will have to submit to a journal with much stricter word limits. But the fact that I have a lot of raw material to work with feels great.

It's 6 p.m. now and I've been up since about 6 a.m. (FYI: this is FREAKISHLY early for me.) And yes, except for a about 30 minutes browsing iTunes for some new Bollywood hits and eating lunch while watching some of my secret soap, I have been writing ALL DAY.

Dissertating and Graduating

I went to a school sponsored seminar the other day for students planning to graduate this semester. The administrative assistant (AA) who ran the session taught us a lot about a ton of things including: 1. The vast amounts of paperwork she has to do so that we can get the privilege of graduating this great institution; 2. How much work all of it is (for her); 3. She is on our side!; 3. Each of the requirements (a 15 step plan!) were made by "higher ups" (not her); 4. If we slip up on a single of the 15 steps, we will not be able to graduate; and in contrast to 4 above: 5. If we are her friend (implied: and bring her little gifts) she may make exceptions to 4 above.

We were even given a handy cheat sheet: "Doctoral Students- Final Steps to Graduation." Helpfully laid out in this handout were the 15 different and discrete steps to be undertaken in the coming 2 months. Naturally each step included about 3-4 sub steps, many of which required their own separate administrative fees as well as the contact information for the friendly administrative staff responsible for each, spanning men and women in multiple offices in multiple buildings in multiple states (!) who were all "on our side.". The AA went over each step carefully, emphasizing the finer points of each,including the year in which each step was added to the list of requirements and how it was prior to the adoption of that requirement and which dean or faculty committee requested each step and why (as far as she can tell because "Lord knows I just do what they tell me.")

My favorite, naturally, was Step 6, sandwiched in between completion of step 5 (forms) and step 6 (more forms): Write your Dissertation and have it approved by your academic advisory committee.

Lord knows I just do what they tell me. Though if I find time for Step 6 in between all the legwork that steps 1-5 and 7-15 will take, I will consider myself lucky, indeed.

Ouch

What does it mean when you reluctantly drag yourself into your cubicle on Sunday only to find the following two papers placed on your chair?

The first was what looked like an old photocopy of a chapter entitled "The Hiring Process in Academia." Okay, so I know I need a job. At this point maybe any job. So that's fair.

The second and more telling paper was also an old photocopy, but this time of a chapter called "The dissertation's deadly sins" by Robert Plant Armstrong (Not, I don't think, of Led Zeppelin fame). So you can experience this along with me, here's an pretty representative excerpt from his introductory remarks:

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"The dissertation system must have laid at its door an enormous squandering of creativity, youth, time, and money each year upon the execution of prose works that do not communicate significantly and are therefore dysfunctional."

...Armstrong continues by describing, in barely constrained glee, the "six grievous assaults" upon discourse perpetrated by the graduate student via his devil tool, the dissertation as "...amateurism, redundancy, trivialization, specializationalism, reductionism, and arrogance. One or all of these defects can usually be found in any given dissertation."

---

Ouch.

What I wonder, is this tempting fate? Is it too cynical to simply assume that I too will write such crap? That by having such low expectations I will fulfill them? Or is it a pragmatic view that will help me get out the door?

Perhaps I can feel comforted that the leaver of said papers tried to mask this indictment as a gift by also leaving behind a small plastic cup full of flowers and a giant shipping tube.

Saturday Cynical Quote Edition

"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."
-J. Frank Dobie (1888 - 1964), "A Texan in England", 1945

There is data, and there is DATA

Why oh why if you have produced a excel database for public consumption, comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of observations and hundreds of variables would you randomly put asterisks and footnotes into the fields?

I was having so much fun cleaning this thing that I decided to make it yellow, for a little extra enjoyment.*

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*On the plus side, now I at least have some numbers to, uh...play with.

Update After Long Hiatus

I apologize to my loyal readers, all 3 of you, for the long hiatus from blogging. Things have been a little hectic.

First, the diss. It sucks. No data.

Second, the possible post-doc and "real job". I had an interview for a government post-doc a few weeks ago. It was pretty grueling but I think I handled it well. I sat at the head of a table filled with 12 scientists who acted in concert like a firing squad, asking question after question. I flubbed one question big time. In an interview that was about 25 minutes long though, I think my ratio of good answers/bad answers was still pretty good. Honestly, I didn't understand what the guy was asking me and I should have asked him to clarify his question. Actually, from what I could tell, the question was totally irrelevant to my research and even worse, was one of those long, complicated, many-claused sort of questions that ultimately is probably more of an attempt to look smart on the part of the speaker than a real effort to extract information from an interviewee. Anyway, I am still waiting to hear on their decision.

Third, I also went to a conference and presented a poster last week. The poster went well. I managed to do some great scheduling and arranged to have an interview with a non-profit organization during the conference trip. This was a fantastic interview in which I was basically being told how great the job would be...it's really an research position with a ton of self-directed research only....not in academia! I was told at the end of the interview that they wanted me back to interview with the higher-ups and to present a job talk. Great. Plans proceeded on this front....until I received a weird email telling me that "internal changes" may lead to the position being re-evaluated. WTF?!....although I guess it's better to learn these things now.

Finally, I am progressing on two manuscripts that are "THIS CLOSE" to submission.

Also there has been a lot of fun, including a weekend trip to the lake and an upcoming Renaissance Festival/camping extravaganza. So...............dear loyal readers (n=3), that is what I have been up to.

Paperwork and Proposals: MASSIVE NEWS

So BIG NEWS TODAY, Loyal Readers:

****************Four out of four professors agree, it's time to sit around and wait for the Institutional Review Board!*************************


After an extremely extended period of time, it looks like my dissertation proposal is finally complete! Right now I have 2 of 4 faculty signatures and am waiting on the other two to arrive by fax from exotic locations. Next I schlep a huge pile of papers and documentation to the research services office where hopefully they will not request that I fill out more forms. Then, it's sit around and wait for their agonized approval process.

This is great news because I have a progress report due by Friday and I really wanted to have some progress to report about.

Actually I was thinking, with all of these gyrations that we go through to protect human subjects and their associated data, there is still one big loophole that the IRBs around the world have neglected to address: Accidental Disclosure During Sleep (ADDS).

I don't recall a single discussion or affidavit regarding ADDS. What if, in a fit of restless, nightmare-ridden, dissertation-anxious sleep I accidentally disclose the census tract and shoe size of one of my survey respondents? My partner could hear this and in a fit of jealous rage regarding my dissertation fixation on total strangers, could start stalking all size 13-ers in East LA.

But what could be done to prevent this egregious violation of the right to privacy? Maybe there is some kind of preventive pharmaceutical for this? Or maybe all partners of researchers should sign a form stating that they will not act on information obtained via ADDS? Or maybe there should be no during-dissertation sleeping at all? Any thoughts?

Dissertation Proposal Progress

There has been more progress on the dissertation front. (Yes, I am STILL stillin school.) Three of my four committee members are satisfied with my proposal and the last--my statistician--got back to me today about his revisions. Despite my fears, his comments are not only helpful but they're actually pretty easy. After all, how hard is it to delete an episilon from an equation?

Even better, during our conversation today, we laid to rest A BIG ISSUE. A potentially huge analysis problem (I thought) that was already causing me anxiety. It is now a NON-ISSUE.

Still more progress, I have received official approval on one front to use the data, and from another, to pay for it. Can this really be happening??!

Meanwhile, I am finalizing my first application to a post-doc position. Since this is so much fun, I figure, why not continue onward?!

Some success is good

Some good news from the proposal front. After what seems like a lifetime of procrastination, revision, and some actual writing, I have completed some sort of final draft of my dissertation proposal. My chair and advisor have signed off on it and yesterday I sent it out to my statistician and my 4th committee member. I don’t expect many revisions from the committee member but the statistician, as they all are, is bound to be a bit more unpredictable.

It is, in total, including references but not all of my appendices, nearly 15,000 words long. What the hell is wrong with me?!

More good news: I have actually applied for data access. My data is kept under lock and key with what seems to be more security than the freaking Hope Diamond. Needless to say, the application to allow me to actually analyze the data is pretty intense. I wouldn’t be surprised if they undertake a criminal background check and start calling on my friends to find out my dirty little statistical secrets. I can totally envision my undoing, "Yeah, and once, she like totally forgot to check for multicollinearity when running a logistic regression exercise in class." Thus sounds my death knell.

Next up, university research application protocols and institutional review board (IRB) application. This is bound to be the best part.

To All: Take Note

Some graduate school etiquette for all of you, from Phd, Piled High & Deeper, a grad student comic strip.

Dissertation Freak-Out Update

So to my loyal readers (all 3 of you) who follow my blog and may have not heard, I spoke with the person who is working on my dissertation topic at the other institution. Fortunately this person was very accommodating, helpful, and is pursuing a slightly different approach to the research. Also, fortunately, this person is not a student and is not under the same melt-down-stress-level as I.

Thank goodness I don't have to scrap all the work I've done so far! Although I may omit a few things and/or change a few of my measures, it won't result in drastic changes and doesn't compromise what I am trying to do.

Nevertheless this potential overlap/competition/whatever-it-is should give me some added motivation. Right?

Big Progress

In anticipation of my much overdue upcoming meeting with my advisor this afternoon I have made some big progress on my dissertation today:

1. I wrote something. (Holy cow!)
2. I removed 3 piles of papers off of my desk and placed them on the top of my filing cabinet. These were piles of papers related to other manuscripts that are in progress. I asked myself, "Why should these be competing wih the diss?" Now to get to them I have to look past the diss piles (which is getting increasingly difficult to do as they are growing exponentially).
3. I have given myself until COB tomorrow to finish my proposal revisions and send to chair. He is aware of this.
3. I am trying to scheudle a phone call with chair.

Happy Crappy Research

Research can be painstaking and boring. Tedious. Repetitive. But sometimes things happen to upset the balance. Why do they all happen at once? Today I experienced a major happy/crappy collision. See below for a summary.

Happy:
I found out earlier today that an abstract I submitted to a conference next fall has been accepted. Yippee! This is good news, especially because it's important to me to try to get some recognition in this area. I might soon be applying for an open position in this obscure sub-field, so the more I have, the better.

Crappy:
I found out that another paper was accepted at this conference. Having only seen the abstract, this paper appears to be MY PROPOSED DISSERTATION. Yes, this abstract shares my dependent variable of interest, my proposed dataset, AND something seemingly similar to my independent variables of interest. The only catch here is: I DID NOT WRITE THIS ABSTRACT. Panic mode has set in and I have already started making calls to my minions to find out just what the heck is going on. For any of you non academics, it's important to know that we live by a few basic rules including this one: 1. If you do it, you want to do it first. If you don't do it first you look like a chump who can't think of something original. And if you aren't original, why are you an academic?

I'll keep everybody posted as this develops....