It's so beautiful

I just discovered the ease with which you can create a Table of Contents on Word. I have this document that I've used headings for. All I did was go up to the quick toolbar (or whatever that thing across the top is - the options below the real toolbar), click "Document Elements," click "Table of Contents," choose my style and voila!


An outline of my first chapter! Which needs work. But at least seeing the outline of it was easy peasy!

This is a test. This is only a test.

Is it possible for me to turn off the internet for the next six hours? To not give in to the temptation to turn the wireless back on? Honestly, probably not. But I'm going to give it a try. Starting now, at 10:20 in the morning. If I can make it to 4:00 without going online, I will do a victory dance that involves jumping around the room, walking like an Egyptian, and dancing like Carlton Banks. I will also have gotten a lot of work done. Here we go!


Update: I MADE IT!! Okay, I might've turned on the internet for less than a minute at lunchtime to check my email. And I might've stopped the clock a half hour before my 6 hours were up. But I'm still considering this a success!

Ah, facebook

Relationships between grad students and faculty are so weird. It's like that limbo-land between being subordinate and being colleagues. Facebook helps make things even weirder. Everyone knows that young students (undergrads and below) shouldn't become facebook friends with their teachers, at least until they graduate. (I'm wary of any professors who break this rule.) But what about grad students?

I thought I solved the problem by just not friending them. And then they friended me. Should I have refused? I didn't. I hoped it wouldn't be a big deal, and it actually hasn't been (to my knowledge).

But then there are days like today when I open facebook to discover my adviser in her Halloween costume touting her new-found love of go-go boots. Really?

More refreshment

I was feeling a bit stumped this morning, so I went back and looked at my prospectus powerpoint. I have to say, that was a nice-looking presentation. You know when you choose the right colors and formatting and it just looks good?* Ahh.

It was refreshing to look back and really look at the whole big picture, to remember that I am actually interested in this, to remember that I have actually already done a lot of the work, and to realize that this is going to get done and actually not be too bad in the end.

I'm revising my hypotheses. Does that sound bad? Don't worry, I'm not actually changing any aspects of my research or fudging so it sounds like I was going for something different. I just don't like the way I organized my research questions. I feel like if I somehow reorder/rephrase them, they'll fit in with the big picture/theoretical implications better. Now I just have to figure out how to do that.


* In case you're curious, the pptx theme was "Advantage." It definitely ranks as one of my favorites. Not too busy, no lines boxing you in, enough color to be fun but still professional.

Chop chop

Today I switched my focus to chapter revising. It was so refreshing! I thought I preferred doing the objective tasks, but that had become so tedious that it was nice to step back and look at the big picture again.

I'm looking particularly at my pilot studies and hypotheses today. I had written all this up for my original prospectus, but of course am unhappy now with how that looks. I've realized that my second pilot study is only marginally related to my present research and the conclusions actually prompt me to look at entirely different things. So chop chop! and it's gone. Now I just have one pilot study that is clearly relevant and impacts my current methodology. Much nicer.

I should note that I am not usually able to delete large chunks of what I have previously written. It's a psychological hangup of sorts. I want to hang on to it, just in case, and do so by leaving it in and just putting a line through it or changing font color or some other method. However, after awhile that gets really cluttered and you're so distracted by thinking whether or not you should include that stuff that you can't move forward. So I have taken to just creating a new document every time I plan to do some major revision, making sure to include the date. That way, I can always go back and review what I've chopped. This really frees me from the fear of deleting something brilliant. And most of the time, it wasn't brilliant and I don't miss it at all.

"So what do I do now??"

I try to write a tiny bit each day about what I've done that day. Usually I just jot down my thoughts as I'm going through things, so that I can look back and remember why I did something a certain way. Other times I think this might be the start of something brilliant, so I'd better write it down so I don't forget it! Sometimes I just write anything down so that I can pretend I actually did something that day. And finally, many times I just write down my complaints.

Yesterday's note ended with a melodramatic "So what do I do now??"

This morning Soothing Encouraging Me responded to Freaked Out Me.

"What you do now is breathe and reevaluate. Go through and think again about what questions you want your data to answer. Then take a break and work on something else, like writing a different chapter. Then jump back to where you were having difficulties with renewed vigor! You are smarter than this dissertation! You will prevail!"

And yes, I actually wrote that down.

It's November

And I'm still not done with my statistics. Excuse me while I bang my head against my keyboard.

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