The woeful negligence of this blog has partially been me over-committing myself this school year, as well as making good progress on my research project. The thing with research is it has its highs and lows for a million reasons. The plus side of being on the “high” side is I’m making progress. The down [...]

This summer has been going by so quickly, with the unusually hot weather and ample work to be done. My dissertation proposal/research things are going. A new aspect I’ve telling people about is there is more management and organization of my committee from my end. Professors, as we all know, are typically overworked and overcommitted. [...]

Some of my classmates warned me that during the research process, their homes were pristine clean. Reason being they used cleaning as means of procrastination. It turns out I’m similar. While I am making progress and working on things (namely, lit review), cleaning has become more of a priority. I’m not sure if it’s the [...]

Despite finals having end for me about 2 weeks ago, life hasn’t stopped. We’re still in midst of hiring process that will hopefully be over soon. I haven’t had quite as much time for research-related things as a result. My goals are to complete my comprehensive exams in the course of the next month and [...]

I’ve been trying to provide support to a friend who is trying to complete her master’s thesis. While from my own experience, I have a lot of thoughts and advice but today I was thinking I am only one person. Granted, I did a lot of reading and researching to learn how to handle issues [...]

This is my last semester of classes, and right now, I’m a little amazed how tired I am.  There have been a slew of personal issues and schoolwork has been quite a lot. Not to mention research commitments and commitments I volunteer for. I’m glad I take time out for dance. It is good stress [...]

The part of my experiments of organizing and restructuring things has been exploring new software. My latest discover has been a new word processing software, Scrivener. This software is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux OSs. When looking for software to ease dissertation writing, I stumbled upon Scrivener. So far, I really enjoy it as [...]

Backing up one’s computer is something that should just be. For a dissertation or thesis writer, it should be like breathing. I had only one scare with my master’s thesis (minor computer issues overall but it involved a trip to the Apple store), but it isn’t worth the scare. During my dissertation proposal writing class, [...]

Sometime during last semester, I thought my dissertation proposal class and I should continue working together in an informal support group. Basically, we can critique each other’s work, discuss stresses we have in writing, be supportive of one another, pass along resources, etc. In a program like mine, as lovely as it is in many [...]

While I’m less than optimistic about having a complete, ready to defend, project proposal for my dissertation by the end of the semester, I am optimistic that I will have something by mid-spring semester. The issues have been as follows: Time. My grading has been rather heavy this semester, double what it was last semester. [...]