Dissertation Hell

Thank You

2006-01-21T13:36:00.000-05:00

Thanks so much everyone for your support. I am feeling considerably better now. I'm definitely looking on the brighter side of things. Now I just have to decide if I want to make revisions to send this off to a publisher. I think it needs quite a bit of work for that, but people keep telling me I'm too much of a perfectionist, too hard on myself, and never give myself enough credit. I guess I'll make the revisions necessary for me to think it's good enough to turn in to the school (they give you a month after the defense to make changes, fix bibliography and format, etc.), and then I'll have someone neutral read it and give me an opinion.

I liked having this blog throughout this process...it helped to be able to anonymously "bitch" about stuff. Even if I never even got around to half the bitching I wanted to do! It was good to have a place to vent and to reveal my deepest insecurities without having them tied to me forever. Soon I'll be able to disappear into the ether if I so desire. If anyone else feels like joining the blog, please let me know. And thanks again for reading and being with me through my ups and downs!

Feeling Better

2006-01-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm feeling better, thanks to some of your comments, friends' support, and the positive responses I got at a conference this weekend. I talked to one of the professors too and apparently I didn't do as bad as I thought I did, and some of what was happening had to do with inter-committee tensions. This is just further proof of how I'm way too sensitive. It was hard not to care about the judgment of all my committee because I spent so much time and effort on this.
In response to Dr. D.:

Dr. Porkorama,
What college do you attend? Just interested in knowing how someone could complete their dissertation in three months? How many revisions did you complete, how many times did your profs review and feedback info on your work-in-progress and what classes did you have to take before embarking on the work? Just curious...

I don't want to reveal where I go to school because that would kill my anonymity. But to give you some idea, while I've been here, we've been ranked #1 by U.S. News & World Report and are up top regularly. The course work is 15 classes in addition to the other requirements. I guess it can be pretty misleading to say that I wrote my dissertation in three months, because it had been gestating for much longer than that. 5 years to be exact. I had only written 30 pages of it, however. Everything else was research and notes. Yet, most of it was worked out in my head before I started. More than anything else I thought about this stuff A LOT. Just didn't do anything about it for a really long time! I also only ended up writing a tiny part of what I had in mind. It came out to about 300 pages. A lot of other people in my department have done more like 500, even though 250 is what's expected. So it's not like my school is shoddy or I pulled off a miracle. But I did work my ass off those three months, eating TV dinners while I read essays, not doing a single other thing except my teaching duties. No social life, not much eating or sleeping. It's certainly not the way to go. But it's over now and I can get on with the rest of my life!

What's Done is Done

2006-01-13T16:41:00.000-05:00

I woke up after two hours of restless sleep, took a shower, printed out my notes, got dressed, quickly drove to campus. Last night for a moment I actually was able too think through the congestion caused by my cold...I even thought I might give a really nice presentation. Well, that's not how it went at all.

First, they made me leave the room for a good twenty minutes while the professors discussed amongst themselves. The defense was in our department lounge, which is in the extremely stuffy and hot basement of an old building (a bunch of pipes line the ceiling...it WAS like I had descended to hell!) I had put on a double dose of antiperspirant, worried that the sweat would soak through my silk blouse. It was so hot and I was so nervous that I broke through the barrier in less than 30 seconds. Still, I was afraid to step out of the building for some fresh air in case they called me back in. Each minute went on and on and on. What were they discussing for so long??? Was this a bad sign? I had thought this discussing would happen after the defense, not before. Why don't they walk you through it a bit in advance?

Finally the called me in. One professor was on speaker phone--never good. They asked me to start. I got off to an OK start, but then I blabbed away for too long saying the same thing over and over...I lost my train of thought. I didn't talk about all the relevant examples and wonderful things I had thought I would talk about. They cut me off because I was going on for too long. I am extremely sensitive to mood shifts around me. I could feel restlessness and something else, like boredom, or..."yeah yeah get on with it." But do I imagine these things or are they real? Then they took turns to comment and ask questions, but we only ever got to the first two professors because we ran out of time. They were supposed to schedule three hours but only scheduled two because one of the professors had to be at a meeting.

The two professors hadn't a single good thing to say about my dissertation. It was all criticism. I agreed with some of the critique by Prof. #1. Then I disagreed with his view of X philosopher a bit. Prof. #2 agreed more with Prof. #1 than with me. They spoke as if they were right and I was just getting it wrong. But I could have debated with specific passages and everything to support my view (I did a little, but they were just convinced I was getting it wrong so they didn't really engage my arguments). Prof. #2, I thought, might have liked what I had to say, but he didn't seem to like it at all. Nothing! But when I asked him to be more specific in his critique, he couldn't be. He'd say things like you weren't specific enough, or what you say is off the mark, but not tell me how. Then on three points he said what his perspective was and I thought it was exactly what I had thought I said...I agreed with him, but he didn't agree with me. Maybe I just wasn't using the right words (and different words are right for different people--I had to deal with crossing disciplines as well). He asked if I was familiar with X essay. I said no. He told me the gist of the essay, thought I would find it useful, because instead of talking about Y in terms of A, maybe I should look at it as B. But there is a section of a chapter where I specifically talk about Y in terms of B!! I responded to that question by saying, "you know when I talk about Y in terms of B in this chapter? I thank you for your suggestion, because that article sounds like it gives some background to my arguments." I just got the sense overall of not being understood by #1 and #2. Then we had to end. They made me leave the room again. I thought there might be a chance they would pass me because I knew the other two professors had a better understanding of my work (they'd read previous drafts) and were on my side. If I just had one of the other professors vote in my favor I would make it. But I felt like crying, I felt like it went horribly.

I ran to the bathroom, held back my tears, went back to the hall and paced. Then my advisor stepped into the hall and asked me back in with a "congratulations!" I passed!

But damn...it feels like a defeat, not a victory. Some people tell me it is because I always see the worst side, I always think I did bad and then it turns out I did good. But I distinctly felt antipathy to my work from #1 and #2. I really cared about what #2 thought, too. Bummer. I thought we might be on the same page. At the very end, before he left, he said he HAD liked the conclusion of my dissertation, where I brought up N, Q, and L [didn't want to discriminate against those letters that fall in the middle of the alphabet!], and that he agreed with me about that...he just didn't think I'd gone in the direction my intro suggested I would go. But at that point I already felt awful.

Afterwards, I had a talk with the head of my committee (one of the profs who didn't get to ask much). She said it went fantastically. !!!! ??? !!!!

Let me repeat. ??????

OK...she's prone to that sort of thing. I said, "really??? I thought it was awful." She said that I talked for the longest anyone she knows has talked at their defense before being cut off. I hardly think that's a measure of it having gone well, but I appreciated her support. She brought up publishing again. And then she mentioned that one of the things they talked about before I started, in their private discussion, was publishing the dissertation. She had said to them that she thought it was practically ready for publication, with hardly any revisions. I think that might explain to some extent why they were so hard on me. They probably disagreed with her (I know I do), and so they brought up more objections than support or encouragement because they thought they needed to counterbalance her enthusiasm. I actually had thought yesterday to ask her to play bad cop so that they wouldn't be so hard on me. Of course, maybe they would have just joined in on the pummeling, you never know.

OK...so it wasn't as bad as I've heard some defenses go. But it wasn't great in any way. It kind of sucked. But considering I wrote my whole dissertation in about 3 months, and only prepared for the defense yesterday and had a bad cold all week...what could I expect? I just have this insane need for approval and understanding. And academia has never been the place for me. It's like I can see them but they can't see me. I think my ideas are OK, and relevant, but with certain people...maybe I'm not using the right words...I don't know. Or I guess maybe it just wasn't their cup of tea. Plus it certainly needs some work, at least for it to be acceptable by my own standards.

I just wish I felt a little better about the whole thing now. I don't feel relief yet. I haven't extricated myself from the Stockholm syndrome. I know this feeling will fade and I'll regain my sense of self-worth, but right now I'm just going over and over in my mind what I SHOULD have talked about, and all my insecurities about grad school have surfaced again.

But it's over, right? It's over. Bang or whimper, I get the same degree.
And that's what matters. I'm the first person in my family on either side to have a doctorate. And I am finally free of this thing that was hanging over my head (aside from a few details like a second format check): my deep deep hatred of graduate school from the very first year of it through now (with peaks and dips of hatred, of course, but never like or love). Thirteen and a half years of dragging my feet through something I never wanted to do anyway! WTF was I thinking???

The moral? Do it or don't do it, but don't just stand there suffering! Use me as a negative example! You write one page at a time...you only ever have to write one page...one paragraph...one sentence...one word. And before you know it you're at the end. I know I will feel extremely happy to have completed this as soon as I'm able to process it all.

Last Day of Hell

2006-01-12T14:04:00.000-05:00

Sorry to have been out of touch, and thanks for those of you who offered encouragement!! So...I turned it in last Friday, hoping the professors would not have time to read the really crappy parts I wrote last minute. Tomorrow is my defense. Yep, Friday the 13th...at 9am no less (I am not a morning person). Of course, due to my last post, I have a bad cold. I thought I would spend the past week making revisions and preparing for the defense, but instead I took a break and watched TV and took naps, trying to recover from the cold. Today I have to prepare my talk. I wish my mind were a bit less fuzzy from the cold, but I think it's going to be OK. I had a meeting with my dissertation advisor yesterday, and to my surprise she said that my first chapter especially is so good that I need to send the dissertation off to get published immediately...that she thinks Harvard UP is the place to try first. Hmm.... This could very well be merely a ploy to boost my self-confidence, but I appreciate her comment none the less. I'm still worried, but surprisingly not nervous. Which is not necessarily a good thing! I thrive on stress. She wants me to dazzle the committee with my intro tomorrow...and its hard to feel dazzly with a kleenex stuck to your drippy nose. I am going to buy one of those power drinks to take a bit before the exam, though. I don't want to take cold medicine because it will make me loopy.
Anyway...I'm going to get to work now preparing the talk and reading through my dissertation and trying to anticipate questions they might ask.

M asked how I balance this with my life. The truth is I never did! I did practically nothing for several years, letting the rest of life take over--teaching responsibilities, side projects, etc. Then something clicked and I did this for three or so months 8 to 14 hours a day every day of the week. My aunt died of leukemia during that time, but I had promised her I would finish so the night I found out I doubled my efforts and kept on going. EVERYTHING got put on hold. This is not the best way to do it. If I had worked 1 to 2 hours a day, even every other day, I could have gotten this done and it would have been less traumatic. Starting is the worst part. I think the advantage of doing it obsessively like I did is that you enter this intense thinking phase...you can really focus on just one thing. I tend to be obsessive compulsive anyway. My body went into emergency mode. The day after I turned the dissertation in I got sick. It was like my body was holding out for me.

I need to make revisions before turning in the final draft to the grad school, and I'm hoping to do a more relaxed work-on-it-a-couple-hours-a-day thing for that. I think the key is working on something every day, even if it's only for fifteen minutes. Just like exercise, it's hard to do if you're not in the rhythm, and its more likely you won't do it today if you didn't do it yesterday. Once you get the rhythm going, though, it becomes where you are at the moment. I had the luxury of not having children and only one pet to worry about.

Anyway...off to overcome the hump of not having worked the past week!

I'll report more details when it's over. WOW--my hell is going to be over!!!

Almost There

2006-01-03T00:58:00.000-05:00

I have two more days to finish my dissertation, and I still haven't written a conclusion, the last third or so of the first chapter, and about half the introduction. All because I actually took a break over Christmas. Still, I don't think I could have kept going at the pace I was going before without breaking down. I'm lucky that I didn't get sick! Because I was so afraid of getting sick, I took a maitake mushroom supplement. It's expensive, but it's a powerful immune system booster. I knew ecchinacea just wasn't going to cut it. There were a few times when I felt a sore throat coming on, but I have successfully warded sickness so far (I hope this won't be a case of "famous last words").

So, the unwritten parts will necessarily be rushed and incomplete...right now I'm just aiming for the illusion of completeness. Half the time I feel anxious about that, because I know I'm not going to want to touch this after finishing at all, but there is a part of me that wants to get all my ideas out on the page.

Being in grad school you can really suffer from a sort of Stockholm syndrome.... Sure it would be nice to turn my dissertation into a book just to have that achievement under my belt, but when I really think about it, aren't there a million other things I'd rather accomplish? Being in the academic mileau, however, makes you judge your self worth by the standards that surround you. It's going to be great to finish this degree...will it be just as great to let go of this world?

Past the Point of No Return

2005-12-05T02:05:00.000-05:00

I've got 200 pages I thought I'd never have! I am no longer worried about length....just girth. Ha ha...no...now I am just concerned about getting the whole thing to kind of hang together. I've got two chapters to finish, one to fix, and one to revise, plus a conclusion to write. Supposedly all by the 12th. Yikes! Unfortunately this is also the busiest time of year for my TAships and all sorts of other things have been haywire. I've been surviving on TV dinners gulped down while reading. My eyes feel like they are going to pop at the end of the day. But I must keep going! I am so close to the finish line, I can feel it for the first time ever. I realize now I really, truly never believed I would come this far.

However, furthermore, and Yet

2005-11-30T20:25:00.000-05:00

OK...so now I'm sick and tired of my little segway words. Hell, I can't even remember the right name for them now. Words like:

however
but
though
although
even if
consequently
as a result
thus
furthermore
in fact
in the same vein
even though
while
at any rate
lest

And I also need more of this sort of thing:
for instance
for example

I think after I finish this thing I'm going to only be able to say "aagaafhuh" for about a year. All my words will have been used up.

The Nonacademic Job Search

2005-11-30T20:13:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, you want to get as far away from academia as possible after finishing Hell. If so, you might find this an entertaining read.

(From The Chronicle for Higher Education, 11/1/05)

The Truth About the Nonacademic Job Search
by Elle Madison

After an unsuccessful year on the academic job market, I decided to test the proverbial nonacademic waters for a year. I have watched colleagues struggle through years of uncertainty, low self-esteem, and pennilessness while adjuncting, and I imagined (rightly or not) that the nonacademic world had to be much better.
Upon receiving my Ph.D. in comparative literature last June, I spent the summer applying for writing and editing jobs, consulting career counselors and job-search books, and generally trying to determine which path to take. The nonacademic job, however, has not been as easy to obtain as I had fantasized in my post-dissertation stupor.
Furthermore, I found that the transition into the real world bears little resemblance to the success stories and promises of those job-search books. So I decided it was time for someone to tell the truth about the nonacademic path.
Truth No. 1: You will lose your friends. That unfortunate process may have started much earlier, of course, once you began to express doubts about the academic job market. I can assure you from experience that there's nothing that will scare off your fellow graduate students more than talk of leaving academe.
The idea that a different career, a different life, is possible in the nonacademic world seems to threaten those delicately balanced ivory towers. If you begin to test the strength of the towers, you will alienate others inside the university. In short, you lose your friends because you are daring to imagine life on the outside.
The irony of losing your friends is that the very means of finding a job outside of academe is by networking. Books on the nonacademic job search insist that the only way to find a job is by networking: while pursuing your favorite hobbies!; by meeting people at cocktail parties!; while doing volunteer work! You may have heard that advice before, back when it was in a guidebook to dating.
In neither case is it helpful, since you long ago had to give up your hobbies when you started graduate school, you've become increasingly anti-social while writing your dissertation and, as I already mentioned, you've lost all of your friends. Networking may be the best way to find a job, but you will have to be realistic about the success of that method as a recent Ph.D.
Truth No. 2: You will lose your mentors. My committee members, who read patiently through the drafts of my dissertation, have certainly been exceptionally helpful in the academic job search. I have been greatly indebted to them for their letters of support and words of encouragement throughout the process.
In the nonacademic job search, however, you're out at sea on your own, since the crew members you've come to need and trust can't venture that far from shore. That is perhaps the most startling part of the transition, especially after spending several years relying on a circle of trusted advisers and mentors. As you explore uncharted waters, you will have to learn how to navigate on your own.
Truth No. 3: You will be told you know nothing about "writing." In an informational interview with a technical writer, I was told that I knew nothing about real writing because I had never published an article in a magazine or newspaper. In that case, I'm not sure why I was unleashed on hundreds of undergraduates as a teaching assistant in essay-writing classes.
The writer I was interviewing had worked her way up as a journalist over many years and suggested that I build my portfolio of "clips" (published articles) by writing about something I know. For example, she thought I could write an article on my two fighting cats for a cat magazine. After spending years researching and writing a 300-page dissertation, I can't believe that an uninformed commentary on domestic cats would actually be more impressive.
I've concluded that jobs in "writing" in the nonacademic world must simply encompass different kinds of writing, from news reporting to technical writing. Academic writing, it seems, is not understood in the outside world. You will have to reinvent yourself as a writer, but not, I hope, by writing on topics like feline foibles.
Truth No. 4: Your Ph.D., awards, and accolades mean nothing. One of the curious elements of books on the Ph.D.'s nonacademic job search is that the authors, who have made the transition into the "real world," always begin their discussions by presenting their academic qualifications. Interestingly, they all published extensively, received glowing reviews from students, and piled up awards and fellowships. Their reasons for leaving academe vary, but they all insist they were extremely successful as graduate students and professors.
Similarly, I have tried to squeeze in "Dr." in front of my name at every opportunity, and my Ph.D. is proudly perched atop my résumé. A career counselor, however, advised me against that. The Ph.D., apparently, should be buried on the ésumé underneath lists of skills and abilities, for fear of frightening off potential employers.
The problem with that strategy, of course, is that you wouldn't want an employer who is afraid of a Ph.D., anyway. For now, I'm boldly displaying my academic credentials on my ésumé, with the hope that I will find a job that actually makes use of my qualifications.
Truth No. 5: You will have to throw things away. By that, I mean your papers, your jargon, and your definition of self-worth. A good house-cleaning after graduate school never hurt anyone, but your definition of yourself is perhaps the hardest part of your past to discard. New assistant professors, I've heard, suffer from a similar difficulty, since they have to negotiate the shift from graduate student to "professor."
I had built my sense of self-worth in graduate school on the number of pages of my dissertation that I had written in a week, or the research I had finished, or the papers I had graded. My academic work came to define who I was.
Without the security blanket that was your dissertation, you will have to allow your self-definition to shift. On the nonacademic job market, that means an indefinite period of time not knowing who or what you will become.
Truth No. 6: Rejection letters from last year's academic search will seem hilarious. Let's not forget the upside of taking a break from the academic world. In late July, I received a letter of rejection for a teaching position advertised last fall. I had applied and never heard back from the university, but in the letter the department announced it had received my application materials and, "after much consideration," had decided to offer the position to another candidate. It had, according to the letter, been deliberating for an entire year. The stressful, painstaking process of the academic job machine can, for a moment, look ridiculous. But that leads us to the final and unfortunate truth:
Truth No. 7: Finding a job outside academe is just as difficult. You may believe, as I once did, that the nonacademic job search is much less painful. The process of networking can be liberating, since friends and contacts can actually have a positive influence on prospective employers. The ability to choose to live in metropolitan areas rather than small towns can save your social life. And the fact that you are not constrained by the yearly academic job market and limited job openings means that you can, at the very least, apply for jobs year-round.
However, the real world functions in a manner as mysterious as the academic market. Most employers, I have found, specify "no telephone calls," which means you are left helpless and uninformed. I have, in some cases, eventually received automated rejections by e-mail, but I seem to be waiting by the phone just as dolefully as in December of last year.
Perhaps some will read this as a cautionary tale, but that is certainly not how I have meant it. The opportunity to redefine yourself and explore other, perhaps more rewarding career paths should not be undervalued.
In order to do that, however, you will have to venture out on your own, without the support of your colleagues, your dissertation, or your portfolio of awards. You will lose the security of the ivory towers, but also the fears instilled within. And you will learn not to be afraid.

Ritalin

2005-11-24T18:24:00.000-05:00

Ooo...not such a good idea.

I was having real trouble concentrating today...the reading the same sentence over and over and over thing. Sometimes Adderall has helped me with that. Today I took some Ritalin I've had sitting around for years. I feel slightly sick to my stomach now. And the fuzziness isn't gone.
In the past I've had it happen that I can really concentrate on the stuff, but I have to watch out what I concentrate on. So it was uh...easier to concentrate on blogs and now here I am. Must force mind back to task!

I'm spending Thanksgiving writing because it's a day with NO INTERRUPTIONS...I have to get back on track!

Paranoia

2005-11-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

OK...obviously my self-confidence is still a bit fragile. There's this new Prof. at the university who works on a lot that completely overlaps with what I do--he's perfect for my committee! I asked him about 6 months ago to be on my committee, and he said yes. Then I didn't get in touch with him until September, when I sent him one of my chapters. He said he was excited to read it just from the title. But then I never heard back from him. No big deal, OK.

BUT: Right before she defended, my friend who just finished had a committee member drop out on her (she said she no longer had anything to say about her work because it had drifted from what they had in common), and I recommended the new professor. He had seemed completely sweet and unassuming when I met him, really excited about ideas and not competitive about them, and I told her that. Her committee head (same as mine) also recommended him (she had recommended him to me), so she asked and he said yes. She sent him her 500 page dissertation and he read it right away aned was really positive about it. The day after her defense I went to a lecture he gave, and he was so completely enamored of her work he mentioned it a couple of times during his talk. I went up to talk to him afterwards and re-introduce myself. He didn't remember me or the chapter I had sent, and told me to resend them. He couldn't take his eyes off my friend though, and just told her again and again how wonderful her work was, how very precise she was with her terms, which was uncommon in our field (the humanities--he does computer and science stuff), and as he said that he looked at me. OK, it means nothing, but the paranoid person in me is going uh-oh. But hey, he didn't remember my chapter. Actually, he hadn't even read it. TOTAL paranoia...obviously the comment is not directed at me. But I did feel bad that he hadn't taken the time to read the chapter, especially in contrast to the enthusiasm he showed toward my friend's work.

I put it out of my mind, and re-sent him my chapter, and asked if he was available on such and such dates for my defense. He answered saying thanks for resending the chapter, that he apologized but he wasn't going to have time to read it for a while, and that he wasn't available on the dates I gave him...in fact, he wouldn't be back until January! AAAAAAUUGGH!! So it's looking like I have to find a new committee member on top of all my other stresses. But that little paranoid voice is also going "hmm...why am I so completely uninteresting to him?" My work would seem to be right up his alley. Although it has a different focus than my friend's, in some ways it's MORE up his alley than her work. I deal directly with some of the same topics. I would chalk this all up to my last-minuteness...I can't expect much when I'm doing things in such a rushed manner. But since he was completely willing and thrilled to be on my friend's committee las minute, I'm feeling pretty down about the whole thing.

And he was so perfect for the committee! If only he'd at least read my stuff...maybe he'd like it.... I was hoping he'd get excited about the topics in it (if not the ideas themselves) and we'd have tons of cool stuff to discuss.

I'm probably just being ultra-paranoid, but then I think I felt these little indications the last few interactions we've had...I'm ultra-sensitive to these sorts of things, and am hardly ever wrong in the end. I already have one member of my committee who doesn't really like me...I'm keeping him on because I know he's going to be happy to see me go, so he's anxious for me to graduate! Heh heh.... But I was excited about this one professor. *sigh*

Hopefully something will work out and this will all just be my paranoia and lack of self-confidence.

Temptation Blocker

2005-11-12T01:45:00.000-05:00

Whoa! If only they had a Mac version! This free software lets you block your access to any programs you want. So, if you have a habit of procrastinating by surfing the internet or playing a video game, you can reign yourself in. What a cool idea! The problem for me would be the 32 character string you can input to stop the block.

Back on Track

2005-11-12T01:04:00.000-05:00

OK...I survived that crisis. I've plunged back in. I'm still trying to make it to my goal. I have to finish writing by the end of the month if I don't want to pay another semester of fees. If I can do 5 pages a day, I can make it. So far, I've been going too slow, on average 3 or 4 pages. I'm hoping that with continued practice, I can start writing faster. When I was an undergraduate, my average was a page an hour. Then again, that was for much shorter arguments. Maintaining a line of reasoning and a direction in a 5 to 15 page paper, even a 25 page paper, is not too hard. 50 pages is another matter! And I have one chapter that got so bloated that I'm splitting it in two. It's really funny to think about what I thought my dissertation would include before I started it! I'm maybe covering 1/20 of what I thought I would.

OK...can't lose steam now. Have to step up the pace. My biggest fear is that my two TAships are about to go into end-of-semester frenzy.

So many years of suffering of evading this task...needless suffering, if I had just gotten to it!

If I succeed in doing this...if I succeed in doing this--anyone could.

Self Doubt

2005-11-05T21:23:00.000-05:00

Just two days ago I was completely immersed in my work, and also celebrating my friend's completion of her dissertation. We came in the same year, and I have done everything a little after her, so at first I felt inspired by her finishing. She was very nervous, said she felt the typical imposter syndrome, right before her defense. I knew she had nothing to worry about. She did spectacularly! And I can taste her freedom....
But two days later I am in the horrible grips of self-doubt. I do fine when I'm writing in my little world, reading a bit, but not too much as it can make me anxious about my own ideas. But I was just exposed (though of course only from the outside), to the actual process of turning in a dissertation and defending it. It's been helpful in some ways to make things concrete, but today I cannot stop FREAKING OUT about it!!! I feel the judgment of my committee, the thousand voices of everyone who has ever written anything in my field before. I feel (though I know that it's bullshit) that I have to compete with all of that, that I have to produce something as good as anything that has ever been produced. In order to get through this thing, to feel compelled to write, I have to feel inspired. I have to feel that what I'm doing is important in some way. That I'm right about what I'm writing. But now I only feel a horrible, vertiginous lack of self-confidence. And I just don't have time to feel this. I'm sitting here before the page, wanting to cry because my ideas seem so pathetic, so obvious. It doesn't matter that someone reassures me they are not. I'm stuck in an emotion that I can't think away or ignore.
I'm writing in here, this confession, though I have come to think of this blog as well as a place of judgment, to see if I can exorcise the feeling. I no longer feel anonymous here. I feel compelled to seem cheery, to prevent those "anonymous" comments that express concern at my swings from overconfidence to underconfidence, as if I wasn't aware of them. As if this blog hadn't been started, and started anonymously, for the very purpose of giving voice to my doubts, fears, angers, hopes in all their complexity and all their inaneness.
Ah, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. One more person finished, guys. A person I know. And I will finish too. It may not be brilliant, but it will be done. I'm just suffering a bit of withdrawal from having thought, in my state of optimistic overexertion, that it would be GREAT. I'm going to go back to thinking it doesn't have to be great, just done.

Take away my degree, now

2005-11-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

Many of you will learn that the most humiliating and frustrating part of getting an advanced degree is when some official from your school looks over your dissertation or thesis to make sure the document conforms to the university's guidelines. It seems ludicrous that after you have worked on this document for years (at least in my case), there is a little lady wearing taupe shoes in a windowless office, measuring your margins and page numbers with a well-worn wooden ruler. If the document doesn't pass muster with her, you don't get your degree. Naturally, this woman has no idea how humiliating and excruciating this process is for you. She also doesn't understand that none of us are professional word processors, armed with all the arcane secrets that our writing software holds.

So getting to my point: I am going through this process right now, having prepared the final final final draft of my dissertation, all 569 pages of it. After screaming at my footnotes to make them move into the correct spot on the page, they finally complied. I tore my hair out to get all of my images to fit within the Bizarro World margins required by my uni. Satisfied that my document was in perfect shape, I sent off a PDF of it for approval.

And the little Taupe Shoe Lady writes me back today to say that all looks good, except for the fact that I misspelled "university" on my title pages.

Claims, Maintains, Argues, States....

2005-10-28T22:36:00.000-05:00

...after page upon page of writing with continuous reference to other people's texts, I get stuck repeating the same words over and over. How many different ways can you say someone said something? It's enough to make you want to make up some new words! Here's a list I've jotted down to at least keep some variety in the mix. Does anyone have others to add? It's particularly hard to find good semi-neutral ones.

says
writes
maintains
contends
claims
argues
declares
holds
states
pronounces
remarks
announces
proclaims
affirms
testifies
insists
tells
admits
articulates
attests
professes
communicates
boasts
criticizes
allows
reveals

Next...segways!

Under the Gun

2005-10-25T12:36:00.000-05:00

I have exactly one month to finish my writing, and I have:
1. 1 finished chapter that needs revising.
2. 1 chapter that I plan to finish this week.
3. 1 chapter that is barely started.

I'm thinking this is impossible. But if I write 5 pages a day I might meet the minimum number of pages that I think will be acceptable. I am plowing ahead because I have to at least try, and maybe a small miracle will occur and I won't have to pay another semester of ridiculously expensive fees.

Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems

2005-10-22T17:30:00.000-05:00

Thought other academics might be interested in this piece of news from the NY Times: Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems.

How I Write Videos

2005-10-22T00:24:00.000-05:00

Check out these How I Write Videos, where writers share their "habits, idiosyncrasies, techniques, trade secrets, hidden anxieties, and delights" in writing.

Not Perfect, Not Bad...just GOOD ENOUGH

2005-10-12T10:55:00.000-05:00

Now that I'm actually getting into my writing, I'm having the hardest time not massaging my words to death. The truth is I've always suffered from this. I've been the type of writer who does not go onto the next sentence until the previous one is perfect. I am training myself out of that now. But I'm still a perfectionist. I comb over what I've written and change and tweak. I never regret doing so...every avenue I explore leads me down another interesting path. The problem is right now I don't have TIME to do that! I have a month and a half to write 3 more chapters. I don't know if that is even possible! So I just have to write something passable. My mantra for the next two months is going to be "let go, go on."

Index of Doctoral Dissertations in Progress

2005-10-06T10:57:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid to look at PhdData.org - The Universal Index of Doctoral Dissertations in Progress since one of its aims is to "avoid duplications in doctoral dissertations," and with my luck there's someone writing on the exact same thing I am, but this is a potentially useful site! I'm going to register and check it out. It might be a good place to share resources with people working on similar projects.

I'm Regular!

2005-09-23T00:28:00.000-05:00

For the first time EVER, I have been writing for a few hours every day. Boy, does this make it easier! Not that it's surprising, but it sure is soothing. I have always been the "write-under-lots-of-pressure" type of person. Unfortunately since I have to finish writing before December I'm going to be a in a crunch again. In a way, only the pressure got me writing regularly. But now I wish I'd listened to that "Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day" book.
Still, I'm making slow progress. It takes me about an hour to "warm up," so if I don't write for about 5 hours, then I only get a few paragraphs done. Sometimes only a few sentences. But the more I do this regularly, the easier it flows. Even if I don't have time to write, I'm going to make sure I read some of what I've written or review notes or look at a source to keep my brain on track.

The Dissertation Flail

2005-09-21T19:42:00.000-05:00

Check out this post on the Vitia blog: The Dissertation Flail. Heh heh....

What do you do when....

2005-09-21T19:09:00.000-05:00

...you read something that is almost exactly, or exactly, one of your key theses in your dissertation in a book that has already been published? AAAAAUUUGGHH!! I hate it! I know no idea is completely original, but it sucks when you've finally come up with something that you think is a fresh take on something, and then there it is already. I have one committee member that says, hey, you're gonna say something someone has already said before, but you'll say it different. My question is, what do I do about this book? It was a book I was only skimming through quickly to put in as an example of a book on its subject matter in a footnote. Then I find it says something that even my advisor was saying was going to be my original take on a theory in my field. And OK...maybe I put it differently, and this other author says it more poetically than I ever could, but if I quote the book it looks like I got the idea from him, but I didn't. Do I just pretend I never saw that book? This problem is worse when it happens to be a crucial book in your field (this one isn't) which you have to have read. It's also happened to me that I haven't read a key book I should have read, and there is the person making the same claim I was going to make and I don't find out until it's too late.
This happens to me when making films too...often I've had an idea, and then watched a film that does something very similar. I know from my own experience watching other films that if film A is before film B and they both have a similar plot twist or technical device or whatever, I assume one inspired the other.
I guess it's kind of pathetic to be like "hey, I thought of this on my own!" Who cares anyway, right? But for practical purposes, in a dissertation...I'm not going to drop my idea just because someone else had it too, but how can I keep it mine without someone assuming I "stole" the idea?

After the defense

2005-09-19T12:04:00.000-05:00

Well, I made it. I flew back to Boston from CA last week and had my dissertation defense on Tuesday. I think I'm still in shock.

I had gotten far too stressed out about the defense in the couple of weeks leading up to it. I was convinced that I was going to get a lot of questions about what didn't go in to the dissertation and that the defense would turn into something more like orals (qualifying exams). Everyone around me--including my husband and a friend who have their Ph.D.s--were telling me that I was too stressed out. Even my advisor was telling me not to worry in the days before the defense. I was expecting some weirdness with my committee--the prof. who vanished for the two months before the defense and the prof. I had never met before--so I think that made me nervous. I had an upset tummy and what for the life of me felt like heart palpitations the morning before the defense. Icky and so not worth it.

I can't say that a defense is nothing to worry about, but in my case it certainly wasn't anything that I should have been stressing so much about. I had tried to foster an attitude about the defense, one that diffused the fears that a word like "defense" is meant to evoke. I had been trying to think of it more as a collaborative two hours, where the five committee members would be trying to help me improve the dissertation. And that is exactly what happened.

I’m still sort of stunned by the supportive feeling I got during the defense. The questions began with the phrase "When you turn this into a book, you might want to…" I was told that I wrote a very "sensible" dissertation. I was glad to hear that, especially since one of the aims of my research were to correct some heavy-handed casuistry created by other scholars about my topic.

So I'm still in the Sally Field 1984 Oscars "You Really Like Me" stage. I had an especially virulent case of "Impostor Syndrome" before the defense and I'm just now feeling the end of the aftereffects.

Over the course of my Ph.D., I ended a marriage and started a new one. I moved from one side of the country to the other. I dealt with a mother with mental health issues. I handled money troubles. And I even recovered from an accidental deletion of 100 pages of my dissertation. If I can make it to this point, anyone can.

Dr. Francesca???

2005-09-14T16:57:00.000-05:00

How did it go? I bet congratulations are in order!

I'm fighting cancer! Ask me how!

2005-09-09T13:05:00.000-05:00

Via Forbes:

Here's news that could ease worries about breast cancer: Women with higher levels of daily stress showed a lower risk of developing the disease, according to new research.

Yes, I'm seriously stressed out right now. I leave tomorrow to go back to Boston for my dissertation defense on Tuesday. I'm doing "chicken dance," as my husband would say, trying to get paperwork together, picking up my suit from the dry cleaners, cramming last-minute reading, making sure my students are taken care of for the week, trying to remember the word "casuistry," and so on.

On top of that, I'm fighting what's known in the land of perpetual graduate students (gradual students?) as "Impostor Syndrome." This syndrome is marked by a paranoia that the "Phony Police" will arrive at one's door to declare that the individual was only accepted to graduate school through a clerical error, and thereby all work to this point is null and void and by the way, you're a complete fraud, intellectually-speaking. It seems that far more women than men are plagued by this syndrome, for some reason. I'm just feeling a tsunami of self-doubt washing over me. I know well that my advisor wouldn't have arranged the defense were I not ready for it, but the little voice in the back of my head says "Yes, but you've slyly convinced him over the years that you're not a fraud, but you know deep down you don't really deserve a PhD."

This isn't at all a plea for pity and encouragement. I ranted last night to my husband "If one more random person tells me 'you'll be great!' I'm going to freak out! These people don't even know me or my work! How do they know I'll 'be great'?!" This rant came after the massage therapist I went to see yesterday, to whom I had to explain what a dissertation defense is, told me that I would 'do great!' at my defense. Yes, you can tell that the massage did wonders for my mood and stress levels.

I do know, in the pit of my stomach, that I will do fine at the defense. My advisor has already asked me where we should go for my congratulatory dinner. But I'm the most lazy perfectionist you'll meet. I expect perfection from myself, but am rarely willing to put in the effort that it requires. I want to really ace the defense, but I could have done a much better job in terms of really studying some of those secondary sources. It's my very last exam, ever, so maybe you can understand why I want to do very well and not just eke a pass.

Fortunately, my second reader has resurfaced. Apparently the barn burned down and then he fell down a well and Lassie couldn't find the sherrif to come rescue him...Or something.

Sorry for ranting. Had to be done.

PS: Forgot to mention that one of the members of the defense committee is a person to which I just submitted the letter of application for my dream job. She would be my immediate supervisor and is going to see me have a meltdown on Tuesday. It's anxi-tastic!

Incommunicado

2005-08-28T11:17:00.000-05:00

So my dissertation defense date is rapidly approaching and 4 of my 5 committee members are supposedly reading away, marking up their copies of my diss., and preparing their questions for me for September 13.

But my second reader hasn't even gotten his copy of my dissertation. More than a month ago, I sent out an email to all my committee members, asking them where I should send their copies and Prof. W never responded. So I emailed him again. And again. And again. Four times I wrote and four times I got no response. So the other day, I just put the diss. in the mail to the address I had sent him something a few months ago and crossed my fingers. I sent him an email telling him that I hope this is okay, that it should arrive at his house in New Hampshire, and not at his office in Boston. I still haven't heard anything. Good thing I blind-CC'd my first reader/adviser on that message, for he told me I was doing the right thing. I just think it's ludicrous that three weeks away from my defense and Prof. W isn't grousing about not having his copy of the diss. A couple of months ago, before spiffing it up for the final copy for the committee, I had sent him a version of the diss. to approve before I started the machinations for the defense and I still haven't heard anything about that.

I don't know if I should be worried or just irritated. When I was taking courses with him, Prof. W and I got along fairly well, despite the fact that he has a very prickly personality. But once I moved from Boston after finishing my coursework, I was sort of "out of sight, out of mind" to him, which I guess is fine. My oral exams were fine, and he caused no problems then. But the past couple of months, he's been almost completely out of communication.

What I'm afraid will happen is that he'll raise all these issues at the defense, issues he could have raised months ago, had he read the dissertation then. Since my first reader has been in charge all along, I suspect that the two of them will meet before the defense and Prof. K will tell Prof. W not to make too many waves, or at least not berate me for things that he could have discussed with me during the writing process. I'm very happy now to have had Prof. K as my main advisor--I'm only realizing now how much he has stood up for me and that he has always been in my corner.

EndNote Citation Page Numbers

2005-08-10T12:09:00.000-05:00

I don't know if anyone remembers, but I had a question about how to put in page numbers in citations in EndNote, and I just found the answer in their FAQs! In case anyone is curious:

Frequently Asked Questions: "Question
36:
How do I get page numbers to properly show up in my citations? I've tried the 'Edit Citation' command, and put the page numbers in the Pages field, but that doesn't work.

Answer:
To properly add pages to a citation in a normal author/year output style:
Click in the citation you would like to modify in Word.
Go to 'Tools > EndNote > Edit Citation'.
Put the page numbers in the Suffix field here.
Be sure to include any spaces or punctuation you want to show up between the year and the pages, as this is not placed in automatically. Most likely, you'll want to put in something like ', p. 123', without the quotes.
Click the 'OK' button, and your pages should now appear in the citation.
The Pages field is available here mainly for footnote citations, which are configured to use the special 'Cited Pages' field. Most of our normal author/date styles do not include this field in the citation template, which is why the Suffix field is the correct field to use."

I've Procrastinated and I Can't Get Up!

2005-08-09T12:17:00.000-05:00

Man, I fell off the wagon in a bad way. It started with a trip to the beach...I actually did some reading while there, but then when I got back I fell into a slump. Then my parents were coming so I had to make my house look decent. Now they are here for a couple of weeks and I thought that would add structure and help me work, but I'm just feeling crowded and stressed. I know if I just get back into it the interest will renew and I can get on a roll again, but my attempts so far have been unfruitful. I just can't seem to make that spark of interest go off. I have to prepare a paper based on the chapter I'm writing for a conference I'm going to in 10 days, so I suppose pressure will put me back on track. I hope.

D-Day

2005-08-08T15:13:00.000-05:00

So I just scheduled my dissertation defense: Tuesday, September 13 at 3PM.

I can already feel the acid rising in my throat.

I'm not too worried about it now, actually, but I'm sure that will change in the days leading up to my trip back to Boston. What's astonishing is that the defense just lasts two hours. Two hours to talk about something I spent three years on!

I have a feeling that I will be criticized not for what I put in, but for what I left out. I have to find a diplomatic/scholarly way of saying "Well, my topic was too big and I just couldn't track down every little thread that came up." I guess I can always say that it's something I'd like to put in the book version of my research or something.

Okay, got to spend the last drops of my funding on a plane ticket and something nice to wear. And maybe some Valium.

Friday Funny

2005-07-22T18:14:00.000-05:00

Karl Rove Is TOAST [.com]

EndNote Users?

2005-07-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

Anyone out there using EndNote for their dissertation? I'm finding it very useful--you can "cite while you write," and it will put in references in the format of your choice automatically. You can reformat the citations at any time--so say you're publishing a version of a chapter as an article and the publisher requires a different style than your university does--EndNote makes it a fairly painless process (at least in theory--I have yet to test it out.) I'm also using EndNote for my figures and illustrations, though that is a bit more frustrating. The program only lets you put in one illustration per reference. So if you got a couple of different pictures from one source, you have to input two separate bibliographic entries to use them. But the advantage is that it will renumber my figures automatically if I add or delete others.
Another thing that's frustrating me is that I don't know how to add a page number for a reference when first using the reference. I'll add the footnote and it puts a period at the end of the citation, and then I put in the page number after that manually. I can't just erase the last period. There must be a way to do this right. At least I hope. I'll post again about this if I figure it out....

Use this website!

2005-07-22T09:47:00.000-05:00

This website was a huge help to me when I first started writing: PhinisheD.org.

It's extremely helpful in a number of ways. First of all, the people on the site are very encouraging and there's none of the pettiness you may find in your peers in your own department. Second, there is the 'Daily Board' where you can post daily goals and people will actually cheer you on throughout the day to help you achieve those short-term goals. There's also a place to post long-term goals. Next, you can see that other people are actually finishing--this kind of group mentality is really helpful because you see that achieving this degree can actually be done, plus you realize you're not the only one suffering! There are also many many links to useful tools and information databases.

Use it!

Whee!

2005-07-19T13:42:00.000-05:00

So I just got confirmation that my dissertation is ready to go to my committee in preparation for the defense! It feels fantastic!

I can't believe that it took me two months to get the document to this final stage after finishing the writing back in May. A word of warning: this end part is not very fun. There is a lot of tediousness in terms of word processing, bibliographical stuff, getting images together, conforming the document to the university's specifications... I used MS Word's 'master document' feature and it was freaking scary. I can't believe I managed to do it without blowing up the computer, losing work, or putting big holes in the walls with my head. Just a word for all you dissertaters reading this to know that even though there is a huge sense of relief when the research and writing is over, there is still this really irritating part at the end.

So what's next? I have to schedule my defense for the second week of September and go back to Boston for that. With five people on my committee, it won't be easy to get them all in the same place at the same time, but since I'm coming across the freaking country for the defense, I hope they'll be accommodating.

Wheeeeeeeeee! Yayayayayayay!

Sorry, I'm totally giddy and hopped up on coffeeeeeeeeee!

Publishing Your Dissertation

2005-07-10T13:58:00.000-05:00

I just found the website dissertation.com, which will publish your dissertation as an e-book and in paperback on demand, distributing it through Amazon.com and other major booksellers. You get royalties, and you don't have to sign an exclusive publishing agreement with them--you retain all your rights. Hmmm....there's a link at the top right corner that has a NY Times article on them. Has anyone heard of this before? Thoughts?

Diminishing Need for Complaint

2005-07-10T01:13:00.000-05:00

I think it's a good sign I haven't posted much in here. I actually have been *working.* No actual pages written, but lots of notes. Things are becoming more concrete. I fantasize about finishing and it doesn't seem so much like the impossible dream. Well, at least not some hours of the day. I have to finish by December. I have to! At this point I'm pretty sure they'll just take just about anything I write. Maybe they'll act a bit tough in the defense...but my advisor pretty much said they at this point just want ANYthing. Volume. So often I feel paralyzed because I think I have to get this perfect, I have to write everything there is to say about my subject and in a brilliant way. And that seems so unreachable. But right now, I'm actually considering writing some fluff. Hopefully it won't be inane fluff, but it might not be as theoretically complex as what I had previously envisioned, and maybe that's OK. I'm going to keep on writing. One page at a time. There is only one page to write. Just one.

Holy Mother of Muses!

2005-06-20T02:27:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it! I disappear for a couple of months and Francesca FINISHES?? WOW! Congratulations!!!!!!! Do you feel relieved? Are you happy as hell? When do you defend or have you done that already?

BTW, I disagree about leaving the attack dog section out unless it's too bitchy. I think pointing out biases in scholarship is very constructive and that sort of analysis is what makes a dissertation good. The important part is the way you go about it. I DO get tired of academics dumping on one another to raise themselves above the rest. It can get pretty ridiculous and it's hard not to get caught up in. But there's also such a thing as keeping people on their toes, making them question their assumptions. If the service is to the field and not the ego, then it's all good!

So what are your plans now? Job market? Extensive spa vacation with fruity tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them and foot rubs?

Logorrhea

2005-04-25T10:38:00.000-05:00

Good news, friends. My last internal chapter has just been approved by my advisor! He's sending me his comments this week and I'll have some minor changes to make, but it's essentially done. Although I was pretty sure it was crap (or at least not up to my own personal standards), he said it was "the best section yet." Weird.

I had written my conclusion without much guidance from my advisor as he had dropped out of contact for about ten days (very much unlike him). When I told him what I had done (all 10,000 words of it), he told me that it essentially needs to be cut in half and my favorite part of the whole dissertation doesn't really need to be in there. Maybe I'll cut it out and keep it for an article after my defense. I do really like it--the section exposes a bias in the scholarship, a bias that in the end has no foundation. Maybe the advisor doesn't like it because I'm a bit too "attack-dog" in that section, calling out various scholars by name. Huh.

At any rate, I must find my Anti-Prolix Muse and chop down my conclusion this week. *sigh*

Complete Lack of Focus

2005-04-10T17:27:00.000-05:00

So this blog (my end of it), has become an example of my general tendencies with...well, just about everything (except chocolate--how could one ever lose focus on chocolate?). I get really obsessive about something and then I move on. Wait a second...no, there is a second exception. The dissertation! I never became obsessed with that. I NEED to become obsessed with that. If only it didn't require months of obsession. I have not written anything since being free of that horrible job. I've been busy with TAing and bureaucratic stuff. Taxes. That sort of thing. But tomorrow I have one of my dreaded (but oh so necessary for me) meetings with my dissertation advisor, and I PROMISED that I'd have a new chunk to show. Something "fat" is what she asked for. Sheer volume. I meant to write all Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I am only now preparing to write. I am so good at planning to do stuff. Man, my "to do" lists are works of sheer genius. Detailed, nuanced, elegant...incredible finesse. If in addition to that I was any good at delegating, which I'm not, I would make a good business person.
So, enough of this...gonna go look to see if my muse is hiding underneath some dirty socks or behind the stove.

I'm getting lazy and tired

2005-04-08T13:36:00.000-05:00

This weekend I think I will finish my last chapter, leaving only the conclusion to do. I've been writing bits and pieces on the conclusion all along, so I don't foresee any great effort to crank that out. It would be great if I could just write Conclusion: QED and be done with it!

In writing my last chapter, I've noticed that I've gotten very lazy. I don't track down and mention every reference I see. I don't engage every possible argument or make every possible analysis. I'm ready for this thing to be done and I'm only doing slightly more than the bare minimum. When I told this to my husband, who finished his PhD two years ago, he asked if there was going to be another chapter or section between this one I'm writing now and the conclusion. In other words, he thinks that if there is something to distract my readers after this kind of ho-hum chapter then they will forget about it by the time they get to the conclusion! Who knows...it just might work!

I'm just getting kind of bored with this subject. It's been a rich mine for great information and I can imagine myself using the dissertation for articles or hopefully a book, but I'm ready to move on to something else now.

I guess I'm just suffering from the grad school equivalent of "Senioritis"--scoot through the last phase by the skin of your teeth, just get the job done and get out of there!

PS: I just wrote my 401st page. I should "win" just by sheer volume!

I'm Alive

2005-03-30T01:27:00.000-05:00

*phew*
What a...month? Two months? How long has it been? I finally finished that damn project for which I will end up getting paid $4.17 an hour minus taxes all said and done. Never take a job that pays by the job and not the hour if you don't know what you're getting into! What an awful but valuable learning experience that was.
So...now I have not excuses. I have to get down to some heavy dissertation writing.
Yikes.

A complaint

2005-02-25T15:52:00.000-05:00

Since Porko doesn't think I complain enough, here I go!

I just counted the pages in my different dissertation documents and my dissertation is well over 300 pages. And those are actual, usable pages, about 3/4 of which have been approved by my advisor. One chapter alone is 127. With an intro and a conclusion, that chapter alone could have been my entire dissertation.

My complaint is that my advisor did not help me enough in reining in my topic to an actually manageable task. I spent about 9 months after writing my proposal completely overwhelmed by my original topic. So I actually cut out 9/10 of the original subject to get to what I have right now. And even this is too big. But my advisor, who is generally an immensely pragmatic person, never said that I needed to whittle anything down. As I made my changes he just said "good idea." Sure, I should have known at the start that I had bitten off more than I can chew, but part of the advisor's job is to measure the topic against the time frame of the dissertation and my abilities.

I'm too far in to turn around now, so I'll finish my last chapter and conclusion and finish with a 400+ page tome.

Scared and Encouraged

2005-02-24T19:18:00.000-05:00

So my meeting with my dissertation advisor went much better than I would have thought, considering I only had nine new pages to show (half of which were an edited version of a snippet I wrote in 2003) and she wanted twenty-five. But she was in a good mood and she was mining me for ideas for the article she's writing. She got really excited about my comments and said we should publish something together. I guess that gave me some encouragement. My mom said I shouldn't do it, that I shouldn't let her appropriate my ideas...but the truth is she does that anyway. I don't know if she's conscious of it or not, but she's tried to discourage me from writing something in the past and then used the idea for a conference paper (I think I posted about that a while back). She's done the same thing to a friend of mine. Somehow I can't help blabbing about my ideas when I'm with her, though. I guess I'm trying to make up for the fact that I haven't written them out. So maybe it's not such a bad idea to write something with her...my name would be on it (I've never even attempted to publish anything before) and I would get some prestige from her "fame." On the other hand, the thought of doing anything with her beyond what is absolutely necessary for my dissertation would be a nightmare.

A tip

2005-02-24T19:02:00.000-05:00

Someone gave me a good tip today that works well for dissertating and other things as well.

When you leave your workspace at the end of the day, tidy up a bit and put out the materials you will need for tomorrow's first task. Set yourself up for a good day of work by putting that article that needs reading or the bibliography that needs revising right on top. That way, it's harder to avoid that task and to procrastinate!

Where has she been!?

2005-02-22T12:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry to have abandoned this blog, and the lovely Ms. Porkorama. I've been working, and not working. Here's my excuse.

So I went back to Boston for the Big Important Archaeology Conference and gave a paper about a fake work of art. I was insanely nervous about the paper and that wasn't quelled by the fact that there were more than 300 people in the audience, including my evil undergraduate advisor and Mr. Important Greek Sculpture Man from Berkeley. But the paper went extremely well and I got very good comments from the audience. A number of Important (do you see a pattern here?) Scholars suggested that I publish the paper in the Important American Archaeology Journal.

So I came back "home" to CA (Boston feels more home-like than ever) with a fire in my pants to start work on this article. My health had another idea. For more than two weeks, I was laid up with a really bad cold/flu thing. I'm only now just recovering. I think I've also been suffering from S.A.D. because of the gross grey and rainy weather here in CA. I've been exhausted, bored, and depressed.

But I managed to pull myself to the computer and churn out an article version of my paper. It's now in the hands of my (nice PhD) advisor, who will submit it to the Archaeology Journal, for he was the editor there for 20-something years and knows whose buttons to push. I would be thrilled to have it published and it would be a great thing to have on the CV for next year's job applications. I only have one measly publication right now, plus two published translations (Italian > English), which I don't think amount to very much.

About a week before the semester started here, I got a frantic email from the department secretary (or whatever she's called) asking me to send her my revised syllabus for this semester ASAP! Umm, huh? No one had told me I would be teaching this semester. Fortunately, it's a course I've taught before and I just had to tweak the syllabus a bit to get it ready. It's just the Intro. to Art History course, so it's not too taxing. Nevertheless, it is something that cuts into my dissertation time. If you'd like to follow along with the course, email me and I can send you the link to the class website.

The dissertation was on hold for all of January because of the conference and the nasty sickness and SAD. Last week I got started again on my last chapter. I wrote eleven pages in two days. I'm pretty pleased. Those few pages also put me over the 300-page mark for my dissertation. Too bad it won't be evaluated in terms of gross weight or the number of trees felled!

This last chapter so far is a snore. All description and little analysis. The description (of wall paintings) is very tedious because there are all these teeny, tiny details to discuss. Most of which I think are totally meaningless in the overall interpretation of the house I'm studying.

So enough of this blogging procrastination. Can I squeeze out 8 pages today? Or at least work for four solid hours?

The Tyranny of Mediocrity

2005-02-18T16:32:00.000-05:00

Has anyone every noticed how mediocre people actually LIKE their mediocrity? This extra job I took to make some cash is the worst nightmare ever. It involves creating a certain product for what you'd call the average person. The person that hired me (let's call him X) talks big, but the material he gave me to make this product is ABSOLUTE TRASH. I've seen much better work done by students. But I have to use this stuff to make the "product," right? So I f*cking slave away at this. The whole process could have been a lot easier if X had his shit together and had informed me of certain key information from the start. Anyway, I come up with what I think is a *miraculous* save...something I wouldn't be too embarrassed to show. But guess what? It's not good enough. No, wait...let me rephrase that. It's not BAD enough. I have to make this a duller product. I've seen X's work and it sucks...I thought when he saw my stuff he'd be, if not floored, pleasantly surprised (he expressed a lot of doubt about my abilities at the start--you know, one of these people who thinks they're the experienced expert). But it turns out X LIKES shit. This explains a lot.
The sucky part is making it shittier is not easy for me. I have a hard time understanding this shit standard. It's just a different mindset entirely, and explains why there is so much of this type of product out there already that is so awful and boring. So now I have to figure out how to finish the damn thing. I'm fuming a bit too much right now to concentrate.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just really bad at accepting criticism and what I did sucked and X produces shit but is a discriminating critic. It is so not worth it, but my natural instinct is to concoct a way to produce something he'll find acceptable that I don't find completely worthless. And THAT is going to take a stroke of genius.

Finishing the Dissertation

2005-02-17T23:42:00.000-05:00

I can't wait to have time to read this article about how to finish your dissertation without the agony.

Oops, gotta run.

I Am Going to Die

2005-02-13T23:37:00.000-05:00

This is SO much worse than I even imagined. No time to write....wasting precious sleep time.

Fahrenheit 102

2005-02-10T15:41:00.000-05:00

I've always felt guilty about not working to my full potential. In high school I did well without working very hard and I felt guilty. When I was in college, I always left papers until the last minute, and I felt guilty. In grad school--let's not even go there.
The thing is, sometimes I wonder if I'm being too tough on myself. If you looked at my resume in college, you would call me anything but inactive. I worked 20 hours a week, took a full load of classes, did volunteer work, was on the fencing team for a couple of years, was an RA, peer advisor, committee-for-just-about-anything member....(ha, ha...even as I'm writing this I'm feeling guilty because I still feel like I was faking it).
Grad school was a different matter. For the most part I've done the bare minimum and not even that. Just plain burned out. I never took time off from school. And I had too many soul-crushing experiences knocking out whatever gumption I'd managed to muster along the way. Isn't it ironic, for example, that the semester I worked the hardest in grad school, and that was damn hard, I got the lowest grades? (There are a couple of side stories involved in this that I will write about sometime in "another reason I hate grad school" posts.)
So, this year, it was my resolution to, above all, FINISH MY DISSERTATION. But also to do some other activities that would help build my experience and resume in the direction of what I want my career to be. I have to say I started off well...I've been waking up early, exercising every day from 1/2 to 1 1/2 hours, being an extra-attentive pet owner, eating regular healthy home-cooked meals, attending meetings and doing what I gotta do for those extra-curricular university activities I shouldn't have signed up for.... And continuing all of that without exception while taking that extra job that has now proven to be too much.
I thought I was doing well. But I STILL felt a little guilty, because it seems like other people get so much more done than I do, and because I wasn't doing half the things that needed to get done. And then I get sick.
So it doesn't help that when I talk to my father yesterday and I tell him I feel awful because I'm in bed with a fever and I supposedly have to turn in 25 pages of my diss the next day (have not told him about extra job so as not to upset him), he says, "I hope you have the strength to at least write something."
I know, I'm sick, I'm being oversensitive, he only meant to wish me well...but it kicks in that built-in guilt. OK, so maybe the fever wasn't one of those 104 fevers that make you delirious, but at 102 degrees your brain does not really function well. I didn't even have it in me to watch television.

There is something in this worth thinking about. Especially its relation to my procrastination, to putting things off.

When I came home with As from school as a child, my mother would say "A+s, I want A+s!" Not in an angry tone or anything, just in the "only but the best here!" tone.

Half the time I think I'm not trying hard enough, not performing up to par, and half the time I know I'm working harder than most people.

It's hard for me when someone says, c'mon, just try a little harder, because when I say I need to take a break, I usually REALLY need to take a break and have pushed to my last ounce of energy (though, of course, one can always take that one....extra......step.....) For example, a couple of years ago I was on the roof sweeping and cleaning the gutters with a friend. It was summer and very hot, and I kept on going until I really felt like I was going to pass out if I didn't have some water. I told my friend that I had to take a break to get some water, and he said, "why don't we keep on going until we feel like we really can't do anymore?" I said...yeah, that's right now. I feel annoyed when someone says something like that, or what my father said, I guess because of that built-in guilt...this really basic feeling I have that I'm not hard-core enough, not tough enough. And yet I know I'm strong and can withstand a lot at the same time. It's such a mess in my head how this works. Weird family dynamics are involved, I think.

I'd been trying to pace myself this past week, as much as you can pace yourself working 14-16 hour days, so I wouldn't burn out. Kept on exercising and eating well, took a minute to breathe deep if I felt like I was pushing myself past a limit, allowed myself a small indulgence like blogging at the end of the day before bed. But apparently I didn't do a good enough job, because I got sick. I keep on thinking I got sick because I was feeling too stressed out, trying to do too much. But regardless of what I feel, there are certain deadlines that will not go away. One of these jobs needs to be done come hell or high water. I have to relax, though...getting stressed about it is only going to make it take longer for me to get well....

AAAAUUUUUGGGHHH

2005-02-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

What have I done to myself??? This is the pace I kept up as an undergrad, but back then I was trained into the six hours is a reeaaaally full night's sleep thing. I can't do that anymore! It derails me entirely. Why am I even writing in here after already having spent all day staring at a damn screen? I guess I need to decompress. I think I'm getting sick. And I haven't written a single page of those 25 that are due Thursday (like that ever was going to happen). I have to walk in there with something, though. But this other project is a "real life" project, where the deadlines actually matter and you'd screw a bunch of people over for not meeting them, not just yourself.
Which reminds me...I think about this a lot...if I were writing this dissertation for somebody else, it would have been done a long time ago.
OK, I have to go do something about the rigor mortis setting into my back muscles.

Poor Judgment?

2005-02-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

SquirrleyMojo reminded me in her last comment that it pisses me off that I gotta be secretive about who I am. There are two people I know in "real life" that I have revealed my blog to. Hopefully it won't spread. I know this can seem like some kind of crazed egomaniacal paranoia, and, well, it probably is--but I plan to divulge more of the nasty things that have happened to me while in grad school and I live in a very gossipy place, so I'm gonna fight to keep that anonymity. Actually, the only thing that bothers me about it is that I can't be specific about ..uh...stuff.
So here goes another post filled with vague references. I just got offered this "gig" doing a version of what I *really want to do*...great resume builder though not the least bit interesting in itself, very good practice for my career-to-be. But it's incredibly time-consuming. Full-time work is what the people who offered this to me calculated (40 hours a week), but I know it will take me quite a bit longer because I've never done this before. Do I have the time? No, not really, considering that I stupidly got involved in this other, in this case non-paying, activity in what I'll just call "student leadership" which has been taking up about 10 hours a week, I TA, and my advisor wants 25 new pages by next week on my diss.
No, no...don't try to talk me out of it. I already said yes and am on my way now to the "facility" to start the work.
I'm a little scared...but the good thing is I've only got two weeks to hand over the finished product. So the next two weeks are going to be hell and then I'll say no when they ask me to do it again.

Warning: Somewhat Cheery Post

2005-02-01T23:12:00.000-05:00

Hoo-boy, so I got this friend who's also a grad student (go figure) and probably hates being in the diss writing process as much as I do but is way better at the whole thing than I am. Maybe it's her wry optimism (yes, there is such a thing), but she's the only grad student that makes me feel better about this whole process. I actually almost got excited (*!) the other day when I was emailing with her about my current chapter topic. I realized it was because I didn't feel like I had to impress her and I could write it very casually without having to worry about seeming "critically correct" (politically correct's way more evil twin). I wish she would join this damn blog and post something because she is so damn funny, too. She just wipes the grime off my glasses with her snaky loopy sentences. Here's my official thanks, ______. I'd name my diss after you if they allowed that kind of thing.

Disstress

2005-01-29T22:59:00.000-05:00

I really decompressed over the holidays, and it struck me once again how distressing I find the whole academic world now that I'm back. I went to a lecture by a professor on my committee, and just 5 minutes in I started feeling anxious. I have all sorts of thoughts from "my ideas are so brilliant and I need to put them out there now because no one seems to have realized these things" to "I am the most assinine graduate student ever and everyone thinks I'm a joke." I know that this crazy see-saw between feelings of competence and incompetence is normal. I've heard so many graduate students say that they feel like they are a fraud and are just waiting for someone to find them out. But then I feel worse, because they seem to really have their shit together. Or someone complains about having such a hard time with writing, and about how much they procrastinate, but I would consider myself ultra-productive if I got as much done as they did. I mean, I REALLY SUCK as a grad student.
So anyway, I started getting all sorts of feelings of anxiety....that my topic would have been great four years ago when I should have finished, that there are so many things I have analyses of that I think are good but I suck at expressing them, that I hate the insularity and pompousness that plague so many academics, that I've not published anything ever (or even sent anything out to get published), that I haven't done what I really wanted to do, because I was supposed to be doing my diss, which I didn't do either. I was thinking I came back all recharged and ready to tackle another semester and really get down to writing, and then the day after the lecture I find myself crying my eyes out when I'm about to meet with someone from my committee. Luckily she was late and I was able to stop crying before she got there. I just felt like such a massive failure yesterday, and about everything, not just grad school. I've put my whole life on hold for the past ten years for what was supposed to be this backup plan, and consequently I don't feel qualified to do anything else either. I'm in my 30s and still in school. I never took a year off (huge mistake). And maybe I've stayed in the university all this time because I was just afraid to really grab life by the balls and take a risk. Maybe that's why I keep on putting off finishing this damn thing. As much as I'm craving and looking forward to and dreaming about my freedom, maybe I'm just too afraid I'll be a massive failure at what I really want to do. It's a lot easier being a failure at what I never really wanted to do in the first place.

Delayed Gratification

2005-01-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

I don't think I ever learned delayed gratification. I was beating myself up about that today, but a friend of mine said that her therapist thinks that you either have to find something gratifying in the moment itself or just give up what you are doing. I hadn't quite thought about it that way. I'm reluctant to really dig into work on my dissertation because it seems like it's just going to be such a long, long period of hell (of course, the hell of just putting it off is worse, I'm sure). But I suppose I'm going to have find some kind of joy in writing the damn thing. I enjoy thinking about what I'm going to write about. It's just the actual sitting down to do it in a formal way. It's so tied up in my head to hatred of graduate school, memories of suffering through writing papers, stress of having to write in a particular academic way. I need to reinvent my relationship with writing. I need to make this a new project, something different than everything that came before that I hated so much.

And if I Gave Up?

2005-01-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

"It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them."
--Julian Barnes

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

2005-01-19T22:55:00.000-05:00

OK...I can't see it, but I met someone who already got there, so it's gotta be there. I was in the grocery store when I ran into a past "fellow sufferer." I asked her how her diss was going, expecting to get the usual grumble, but she said she had finished! She's a doc now. Wow. She said it was anti-climactic. But I could feel her aura of relief and doneness. I can't wait!

What I Am Afraid Of

2005-01-18T21:01:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm not sure there's a precise answer to that question, or at the very least it is a convoluted mess of an answer, but I'll give it a stab.

Although it's not just fear. There's plenty of disgust and laziness in there too. Lack of discipline. BUT...I have been getting up between 8 and 9AM, exercising for 30 minutes to an hour, and then cleaning the house like mad. I'm getting ahead on my Spring cleaning. And it's not just procrastination...I really could not live with how dirty the house had gotten. And as soon as I'm done getting things to a livable level (I'm very affected by my surroundings, they need to be orderly and clean for me to feel right), the time I spend in the mornings doing that I'll spend writing. That's the plan, right?
But something inside me resists.

OK...so there's fear of WHAT NEXT? I finish this stage of my life, and then there is THE REST OF IT. This might be a shitty place, but it's really familiar, and there's some comfort in that. And I have a very open schedule. It always seems like I have too much to do...just living seems to take up an inordinate amount of time (I'm talking about maintenance activities like eating and sleeping)...but I don't have to be anywhere 9 to 5. I TA, and at the beginning of the semester it's not too much work, less than 10 hours per week. I should take advantage, because that changes to up to 40-60 hrs a week later in the semester. Which would be fine if it were the only thing I had to do. But I digress....
I'm afraid.... Am I afraid it will suck?
Man, I think I'm past that. I don't give a shit how it comes out. But then my committee seems to. I don't want to write it how they'd like me to write it. That's another wall. We agree on some things. But goddamnit, this is something I fucking hate about grad school. A certain term is NO LONGER "IN." I'm not supposed to use it. Mind you, I had used it with a footnote saying that I was using it provisionally while I tried questioning it and approaching it in a more useful manner. But they didn't care. It just set off the little alarm bell. It's not my concept they have a problem with, it's the word itself. I'm wanting to make it mean something else, just because there really isn't a better damn word for it unless I made one up. In fact, when I ask them what term they would use they don't have a clue. Because it doesn't exist. They want me to come up with one, I guess. Well, that's what I am working up towards with the whole dissertation. But you can't go expecting to cross the bridge before it's built. Whatever they want from me, it feels like some kind of damn koan. Fuck, it would be COOL if what they wanted from me was a koan sorta exercise. But it's not like they have some kind of wisdom I'm just not seeing. I know their fucking game, I know exactly what they are thinking (I've been in grad school waaaaaaay too long), and it's STUPID. They seem excited about the things I think everyone is getting wrong, but the only way I can express them is to go my own way about it. I'm not that great of a writer. I have these ideas, and I think I can get them out, but I need them to make some room for me and give me the benefit of the doubt before jumping on ONE TERM. They don't see that the language is just a stepping stool...it's not THE THING ITSELF. All I can do is approximate, approach slowly. When I finished one chapter, they dug it. They had been against a lot of what I was trying to do with it, but they admitted when they saw the result that it came together. If they were just better listeners they could see that I know what the fuck I'm doing, I just need some freedom to do it how I want to. Which is not the ideal "academic writing" I guess.
Argh.
It's that complex mix of feeling completely inadequate and yet like I know my shit all at the same time. I hate their world. I don't want to be a part of it. But I want my damned degree. It could help me get a job. And I deserve some sort of badge for the blood, sweat, and tears that I've put into this so far. I'm not talking about the blood, sweat, and tears of any of the actual school work. I'm talking about the emotional cost of being treated like you're worth nothing, the backstabbing, the general disgustingness of the high stakes academic career. Makes me wish I had gone to a small state school. Or is it the same as the big name private university?

I should never have started this PhD. I just did it as a safety. And now it's swallowed over 11 years of my life.

I haven't talked much about fear, have I? Right now I mostly feel hate.

The Solution!

2005-01-15T14:26:00.000-05:00

Wow. Turns out I can get a PhD in two weeks with no study required! According to the email I got, these are "real, genuine degrees" and the "opportunity exists due to a legal loophole allowing some established colleges to award degrees at their discretion."

What was I thinking taking classes and doing all that work? I can just buy a degree. This really makes my day.

Drastic Measures

2005-01-07T15:07:00.000-05:00

I realized yesterday that dissertation bootcamp wouldn't cut it for me. What I need is to hire an assassin to kill me if I have not finished my dissertation by a certain date. All contact with this person would be cut off so I couldn't back out on the deal. I find that I can only write under pressure (I'm trying to change that--if anyone has any advice, please let me know!), so maybe this would stress me out enough that I would actually do the damn thing. I wonder if I could find someone to do it cheap, though....

Dissertation Boot Camp

2005-01-03T14:01:00.000-05:00

I've always thought that if grad students (at least in their majority) weren't so broke, it would be a great business idea to have a dissertation boot camp. I often daydream of such a place: Someone standing behind me in professorial garb yelling, "Write, you sissy! Give me twenty sentences, now!" and me obediently answering, "Prof, yes, Prof!" and typing away.
OK, so maybe I don't respond to that kind of motivation well, but having someone else enforce some kind of structure on my life and not allowing me to procrastinate sounds like, well...if not dissertation heaven, then certainly dissertation purgatory.
Turns out there is such a thing: Scholars' Retreat. Thing is, it costs $1500. Hmm...what if I take a leave of absence and use my grad school fees to pay for something like this? Or maybe a bunch of us ABDs could get together in some kind of dissertation-writing commune. *sigh*

ABD Survival Guide

2005-01-03T12:26:00.000-05:00

Here's another resource that a friend pointed out to me that could be very helpful: All But Dissertation Survival Guide. Among other things, it has a great article on Overcoming Parkinson's Law, the law that states that work expands to fill the time available for it. (I think there's a corollary that states something along the lines of "and then some.")

Tips from PhinisheD.org

2005-01-03T12:20:00.000-05:00

Here are a few tips I got from the site PhinisheD, which is a really nice resource for those of us struggling with our dissertations. Thanks to Francesca for introducing me to the site.

1. "40-minute method": Work for 40 minutes and then take a 20 minute break. Repeat as much as desired.
Research suggests that any method loses effectiveness over time, so the trick is to rotate systems.
2. "Thesis binder": a work in progress version of one's thesis. Basically, you put in research drafts, notes, stream of consciousness writing, chapter drafts, etc. into a three ring binder. It organizes your work while lifting your spirits as you see it grow.
3. "Dissertation log": keep track of all the hours you spent working, and what activities you were doing.
4. "Word counting": log the time and your current word count. The idea is that you feel good when you see it adding up.

New Year's Resolution

2005-01-01T12:33:00.000-05:00

I hereby resolve to finish my dissertation this year. May the force be with me!

Windows and Documents Everywhere but Not a Drop to Drink

2004-12-31T21:21:00.000-05:00

I don't know if my computer sucks the moisture out of me or I just get so engrossed that I forget to drink water, but I end up really dehydrated when working at it--which then gives me a headache and cuts down on my productivity (uh...not that there was much of it to begin with). I try to combat this by sipping water constantly. It makes for a nice thinking break too. Powerade used to have these awesome bottles that I collected a bunch of that have a little diaphragm thingamajig in the lid that you suck the water through. It was an awesome design, because you could hold the bottle upside down when it was uncapped, and it wouldn't spill. I was very sad when they changed their packaging. I hoarded as many as I could before they completely disappeared. In any case, if you ever see that kind of bottle, grab it! They make for great computer beverages: no danger to your keyboard, papers, or books!

You Only Have to Write One Sentence

2004-12-31T19:21:00.000-05:00

So as a way of procrastinating, I thought I'd analyze my particular reasons for procrastinating. But I'm feeling too guilty about procrastinating to do that, so I'm going to procrastinate from procrastinating and do some writing. For my inspiration, I'm thinking this:

In one of Alan Watts' essays, he says that if you have a huge pile of dishes to wash, you just have to remember that you really only have to wash the one dish you are washing. There is only ever one dish. So I'm gonna go write my one sentence.

Some progress

2004-12-30T20:49:00.000-05:00

I worked for about three hours this afternoon and wrote about seven useable pages. I keep track of how much I write each day as a motivator, getting a sense of progress. I average about four pages a day, so seven is pretty good.

Noon-fifteen

2004-12-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

It's a quarter past noon and I still haven't started dissertation work. I am, in fact, still in my PJ's and with a cup of tea in front of me.
What have I accomplished today? Not too much, scholarly-wise.
I did get some help from my husband on my paper for the Very Important Conference I'm speaking at next week. I'm nervous about the paper, so it was good for him to read and listen to it, look at my slides and add some input.
But even working on that lecture is procrastination.

After reading Pork's post on procrastination, I do realize that I am just looking for "busy work," something that makes me look like I am doing something worthwhile, but in the end is not really necessary. I have a couple of methods of "creative procrastination," like scanning things for my slide collection and organizing those slides, updating my CV, or ordering books from ILL.

I usually feel resistance toward my dissertation, especially when I am starting a new section. I feel it when I've been on a break and I feel it when I'm right in the thick of it. So I don't really know the solution other than fighting that urge to just goof off and sit down and work. Rather than using the one-minute rule mentioned in the article, I usually give myself 20 minutes. I can do just about anything for 20 minutes. Usually by the time the 20 is over, I'm already in a state of concentration that is silly to break. I don't quite get into Flow, but I do get on a roll. Sometimes I even set a kitchen timer to force myself to sit down and work for 20 little minutes.

Okay, my plan is to get a bit organized around my desk, have lunch and then do a good 20 on the painting chapter. Hopefully the 20 will turn into a couple of hours.

One Reason I Hate Grad School

2004-12-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

When I started work on my dissertation in earnest (a phase that only lasted a few months), and I was visiting regularly with the head of my committee, I started noticing that she was taking notes on the ideas I was spitting out. She'd never done that before...I took it as a compliment! It was great to see her get excited about my ideas. At the same time, however, there was this one, uh...what should I call it...ok...my phantom chapter...that she kept on discouraging me from writing. This in my head is my First Chapter, but my whole committee is against me writing it (more on that some other time.) In any case, I was going to develop X idea in this chapter, but the Head was like, "nooo, you don't want to talk about that, nooo, just skip that chapter." Weeeeelll...I haven't written it yet. But guess what? We went to a conference last year, and X concept kept on being mentioned OVER, and OVER, and OVER. But NO ONE said the things I had to say about it! A paper on what I wanted to question about X concept in that conference would have been PERFECT! But lo and behold! That's not all! My jaw dropped when the Head gave her paper and mixed in with her research and ideas came out a VERY LARGE QUANTITY of the ideas I had been blabbering in her office that she'd been taking notes on! Did she credit me? Of course not.

So yeah, that's one reason I hate grad school and hate having to write a goddamn dissertation for them.

Procrastination

2004-12-30T14:06:00.000-05:00

I just read something on Dr. Rachna D. Jain's website about procrastination that's not new information, but is still great to remember:

"Why do people procrastinate?

Procrastination is another way to describe avoidance- but it's more subtle. Rather than actually admitting that you're avoiding your work, you might try to seem very busy- but in work that's unrelated to your dissertation. Most of the time, procrastination can be understand as a means to cope with fear- and the fear can be that the work will be too difficult, too unpleasant, or too unproductive.If you find yourself procrastinating when you should be working, try asking yourself, 'What am I afraid of?'"

She also has this advice, which I'm going to try out as soon as I'm done blogging:

"Working when you don't feel like it...

At some point during your dissertation process, you will run into resistance: feeling that you should work, but that you just can't get yourself to sit down and do it.
Sometimes, this is a sign that you need a break- and if you haven't taken one recently, go ahead and give yourself one now. Resistance usually shows up when you've pushed yourself really hard to meet a goal, but then haven't given yourself enough time to rest/recuperate before moving on to the next thing. You are not a machine that can just produce endlessly without refueling. If you've just met a major milestone, and are feeling resistance, take a day or two off- and you'll likely feel better and ready to work after that.
If you find, though, that you haven't made much progress, but are still feeling resistant to working, this may be a sign of procrastination. In this case, work for one minute and then stop. Check in with yourself. Can you do another minute? If so, do that, and then check in with yourself again. Can you do another minute? If so, do that, and so forth. If you keeping checking with yourself along the way, you will be decreasing your resistance to working- and still, will be getting a bit of work done where you weren't before.
If you can't tell the difference for yourself, consider always trying to work for 1 minute, and then giving yourself permission to keep going, or permission to stop, based on how you feel. Usually, if you're procrastinating and take one minute to get started, you can keep going.
If you honestly try the 1 minute technique but can't keep going, then don't. You need the break."

Finally, she says to remember that your dissertation is not your life's masterpiece, that you'll write much better things during your career (a much more elegant version of my friend's Words of Wisdom). My problem is that I don't ever, ever, ever want to have to write anything like a paper or article or chapter again in my life. I've hated it for years!!! And I really don't want a career in academia. Not that I don't like teaching, and I would certainly teach under the right circumstances.

Francesca, co-blogger

2004-12-29T21:10:00.000-05:00

First of all, I'd like to thank El Puerco ;) for inviting me to add content on this blog.

Second, I must confess that I spent ALL FREAKING DAY procrastinating on this, this, and sadly this. I did not write a single word of the dissertation today and only half-heartedly worked on bibliography and polishing up the conference paper I'm giving next week in Boston. Shout out to you archaeologists in Bloglandia--I'd love to meet you at the AIA Meetings.

So, what's my dissertation situation? I'm getting my Ph.D. in Classical art and archaeology, specializing in Greek and Roman stuff. My dissertation is about a Roman-period house at Pompeii, in Italy. I passed my orals in March 2002 and had my dissertation prospectus approved in October 2002. I didn't actually start writing until February 2004. Why, you ask? Because I ignored a Golden Rule of dissertation writing--take your diss. topic, chop it in half, chop it in half again, then start working. My topic was too huge. Even as it is now, I could have made the topic more manageable.
As of today, I've got three chapters written and approved by my main dissertation advisor. I have one more chapter to write and then the conclusion. I've been working on the conclusion all along, so I think I can churn that out in ten days or so. This last chapter, though, is going to be a bitch. I've put it off till now because I'm not really jazzed about this aspect of the research--poorly-preserved wall paintings of mundane subjects, for the most part. The paintings that aren't mundane are really problematic, so I know some of that stuff is going to be hard to write.
The hardest part is starting. We know this. Whether it's the first sentence of a new chapter or the first word of the dissertation as a whole, it seems like we are all loathe to just apply our fingers to they keyboard and get going. I started on the hated painting chapter last week, which was a relief, but I've done nothing on it since then. I've been distracted by the dreaded conference paper. So tomorrow, I vow to start again.

Susan Sontag

2004-12-29T21:09:00.000-05:00

R.I.P.

Even when I didn't like everything she wrote, I have to say I admired her critiques of academia, and her success in becoming a public intellectual, something of which I feel the U.S. sorely needs more.

I Know, I Know!

2004-12-29T20:55:00.000-05:00

I'm not supposed to be on here now. I was really trying to work. OK, so I wasn't actually writing, I was carefully typing in references to my new Endnote Program (free courtesy of my university, I guess they're good for something). I think it may save me time in the end, but I'm very much fumbling with it now. When I'm not very inspired, I try to do the dirty work like formatting, bibliography, footnotes, etc. so I'm being at least somewhat productive. Subconscious evasion strategy? Perhaps. I do need to check my organizational skills. It's kind of like how the house gets reeeaaalllyyy clean when something is due.

Working up the Gumption

2004-12-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

OK...I'm about to start writing. No, really. I'm going to do it! I'm just taking a quick break to write about it here first as a last ditch effort at procrastinating. I mean, who am I kidding? This whole blog is an attempt at procrastinating...a very succesful one I might add. Oh why do I hate this process so?

Words of Wisdom

2004-12-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine wrote me the most excellent "pep talk" on writing my dissertation I've had to date. I hope you find it as illuminating as I did:

"OK, now listen to me puerko. Write your f*cking dissertation. Sit down and write it... it doesn't even matter what you say or how you say it, it doesn't have to be a work of genius, but you are making yourself sick not having it done.

You are a couple hundred pages away from having a PhD, so all you have to do is write them. You've been in school so damn long that they will be glad to give you a PhD, even if you give them a piece of total shit.

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT! So stop procrastinating, because waiting isn't going to make it any better, waiting is only going to make you lose your chance.

You can always revise it later if you need to, decide to, or if by some chance they ask you to. But, you need to shit out a big long paper, and go collect your PhD. It will be like "here's my paper," and they'll be like "Thank you, here's your PhD". There's no reason to keep dragging this thing out any longer... even if you deliver a complete piece of shit, there's an awful good chance that no one will understand it either way, and they may even think that it is good.

I'm sure at this point you have thought about it enough to have some idea how you want it structured... so just start filling it in- even if its total shit. You could literally write the entire thing this month if you had to... did I say, it doesn't matter how good it is!!!??

OK, enough, I'm only distracting you... start writing NOW!!! Just write, and don't sweat the details... just get it done... revise later, write now."

Too Many Years of Hell

2004-12-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

About four years ago I reached ABD status, and how I wish that were a degree in itself. But no--I have to write a goddamn dissertation to get the Holy Grail. Four years, and yet I have only managed to squeeze out one chapter. I know about 200 pages is what separates me from long dreamed-of freedom, and yet I struggle terribly to write anything at all. The process is incredibly distasteful for me. And yet I can't give up, because I suffered too long in graduate school to leave without my little piece of paper. Too many tears, too much blood, and a fair bit of sweat have been shed in pursuing what I thought at one time would be a quick "backup plan." Having spent as many years as I have in the halls of academia, I no longer desire to be a professor. But I refuse to leave without acknowledgment of my years of suffering. How will I get over this horrible wall that separates me from The Rest of My Life?