So the chapter I would have been ecstatic to finish yesterday is going to eat up all of today and, yes let's be realistic, a decent chunk of tomorrow unless I truly develop some bionic dissertating skills that I currently lack.
No I'm holding the perfectionism at bay so that's not it. Perhaps I'm just too optimistic with my estimations of how long it'll take me to finish something just because I'm so eager to no longer be dissertating. And in that eagerness I forget to allow myself the bad day where I don't want to dissertate because my brain no longer wants to process this darn thing or because I have the flu or because we have guests or just like that. Or maybe the estimation is realistic at the time but as I write those what happens is that new ideas (I used to call them green points aka my own little flashes of intellectual wonder - or so I like to think - but on the days they end up making me spend more time writing I'm less than fond of them while I also love them...sigh...ambivalence) pop into my head and I know they'd improve the argument and make it more substantive.
Either way you look at it, for better or worse, it's taking me longer than I had hoped to finish this chapter. That I'm working to a deadline (nopes I refuse to share it with the blogosphere right now because I don't want to jinx it) makes me anxious when things take extra days. It's a self-enforced deadline and it's connected to being able to take a vacation - so it is hard and fast in that I really deserve the latter and am craving it.
So back to the proverbial drawing board. Coz it ain't getting done by me blogging away :-). I'll be back!
Showing posts with label the dissertating life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the dissertating life. Show all posts
Friday, July 18, 2008
Monday, June 02, 2008
Mid-year resolution: mini-rewards
Today's issue of The Chronicle has a great column by Ms. Mentor on shortening to-do lists for academics. If you're interested in reading this, and you don't have to be in academe to do so, please check it out here.
An excerpt of some of the ideas from this piece that struck a chord with me or had me laughing while nodding my head vigorously: "Too many academics are riddled with guilt, Ms. Mentor knows. Most of you have been fueled by it all your lives. ... Academics start the summer with a fresh slate, the way the rest of the world starts a new year: gasping with exhaustion, but brimming with nervous energy and wildly ambitious plans. You'll learn Old Norse or study genetics. You'll clean up all those moldering books and papers. You'll alphabetize and synthesize and categorize. ... You've worked intensely through the academic year, and some part of you yearns to be the beach bum or bummette -- the lazy loafer the civilians think you are -- after you've put in nine months smoothly molding young minds. (Civilians also think teaching restless teenagers is easy. Ms. Mentor wishes that stingy legislators were required to take a turn teaching and grading first-year composition at a community college. They just might appreciate the performance anxiety, the classroom radar, and the standup comedy aspects of the job -- and how deeply, deeply draining it can be.) Your To-Do list can include some beach-bunny activity for every day. It can be swimming or volleyball, or cooking something tasty, or getting together with your fellow graduate students or colleagues to whine, conspire, brag, and cheer one another on. ... Summer can be a most serious time for academics. For dissertation and book writers, it's the up-close, concentrated wrestling with ideas and phrasing. For scientists, it means full days in the lab; for botanists and archaeologists, full days in the field. Summer can be the most intense, focused, and exhilarating time -- leading to some bittersweet moments of decision."
Moral of the story? Rather, what's the resolution as the title of this post suggests*?
Instead of binge dissertating and delaying all gratification, I'm going to try to be disciplined about writing a decent amount everyday (which I do have specified on a meticulously drawn calendar). Every time I get done with a chapter draft I'm going to reward myself. And I have plans for vacationing at the half-way mark and grander ones for when I submit The Whole Dissertation. When will that be? Sooner than you think :-).
Here's to a productive and fun summer! Brace yourselves and get ready to call me Dr. B-W (Inshallah! Fingers crossed. Throwing salt over shoulder and knocking on wood.
*[N: I think you should join me in this resolution].
An excerpt of some of the ideas from this piece that struck a chord with me or had me laughing while nodding my head vigorously: "Too many academics are riddled with guilt, Ms. Mentor knows. Most of you have been fueled by it all your lives. ... Academics start the summer with a fresh slate, the way the rest of the world starts a new year: gasping with exhaustion, but brimming with nervous energy and wildly ambitious plans. You'll learn Old Norse or study genetics. You'll clean up all those moldering books and papers. You'll alphabetize and synthesize and categorize. ... You've worked intensely through the academic year, and some part of you yearns to be the beach bum or bummette -- the lazy loafer the civilians think you are -- after you've put in nine months smoothly molding young minds. (Civilians also think teaching restless teenagers is easy. Ms. Mentor wishes that stingy legislators were required to take a turn teaching and grading first-year composition at a community college. They just might appreciate the performance anxiety, the classroom radar, and the standup comedy aspects of the job -- and how deeply, deeply draining it can be.) Your To-Do list can include some beach-bunny activity for every day. It can be swimming or volleyball, or cooking something tasty, or getting together with your fellow graduate students or colleagues to whine, conspire, brag, and cheer one another on. ... Summer can be a most serious time for academics. For dissertation and book writers, it's the up-close, concentrated wrestling with ideas and phrasing. For scientists, it means full days in the lab; for botanists and archaeologists, full days in the field. Summer can be the most intense, focused, and exhilarating time -- leading to some bittersweet moments of decision."
Moral of the story? Rather, what's the resolution as the title of this post suggests*?
Instead of binge dissertating and delaying all gratification, I'm going to try to be disciplined about writing a decent amount everyday (which I do have specified on a meticulously drawn calendar). Every time I get done with a chapter draft I'm going to reward myself. And I have plans for vacationing at the half-way mark and grander ones for when I submit The Whole Dissertation. When will that be? Sooner than you think :-).
Here's to a productive and fun summer! Brace yourselves and get ready to call me Dr. B-W (Inshallah! Fingers crossed. Throwing salt over shoulder and knocking on wood.
*[N: I think you should join me in this resolution].
Saturday, May 24, 2008
"Aren't You Done Yet?"
I seem to not be having a very good month in between all the questions about marriage (which, call me crazy, but I think is really inappropriate to bring up at any point during a funeral) and finishing my Ph.D. I've already ranted in the past about the marriage question...so today it's the turn of the PhD rant.
The underlying theme of all these questions is that if I get a total of 4 months off during the year - or so it seems from the outside - and if I only teach 2 classes a semester then why the hell can't I just sit down to write and finish. How do you explain to an outsider that the "real world" gives you time off to take time off but the academic world is better at giving that illusion than actually giving time off? Yes you can take your own little vacation but at the cost of immense guilt and overwhelming stress that 3 days off is likely going to translate into weeks of catching up. There is something exponential about the work you do if you're academicking - by which I mean either working on a PhD while holding down teaching duties or adjuncting in 5 places as a newly minted PhD or in a tenure-track/tenured professorial position.
When school is in session, I think those of us who try to do this decently well, end up spending about 6-7 hours of prep for teaching a single class. That doesn't include grading, office hours, student meetings, e-mail questions, etc. Then there's the in-class performance - you have to go do it even if you're feeling particularly blah - and you have to do it enthusiastically. If you teach 2-3 courses a semester chances are that about 4 days of the week you barely have time to breathe. That leaves 3 days. You catch up on grading and reading and answering student e-mails. You plan ahead for research projects. You get yourselves organized. One day of the week you slow it down or else you'll be too bitchy and burnt out to pick yourself up and get through the next week. There are always disgruntled students to manage who don't do the work, feel like they deserve nothing less than an A+, and are convinced that their poor grades have nothing to do with their performance but your whims and fancies. [I hear women in academia struggle more with this than men and I think that's purely *&^#@( unfair!) Then that summer arrives. O blessed summer! To the world it looks like you aren't going to work. Except - well you're catching up on the last 9 months when you never got enough time to write and writing what you would have written in these 3 months irrespective.
Of course it isn't all dreary. Some of the students are wonderful, sometimes you reach out to particularly difficult students and it pays off after a few times, and the days you have a writing epiphany can be orgasmic in their own way.
The 5/22 issue of The Chronicle has what I think is a great article titled "Did You Publish Today" that explains the rhythms of an academic life for those on the outside. An excerpt from this piece pasted below really capture the essence of what I'm trying to say:
"When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question. This column, I'm sure you realize, dear fellow academics, is not for you. You don't need me to tell you that when you're working it can sometimes look to the rest of the world like you're curled up in front of the fire petting the cat. This column is ....for the people who believe that academics have the summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn't work. This column is for those who think that getting published is as easy as winning the Boston Marathon."
So for all those people who have asked me why I'm still not done here are some responses based on the year of the PhD I was in then:
Years 1,2,&3: Oh come on! Even an undergraduate degree takes 4 years.
Years 4,5, &6: Contrary to popular belief I can't really whip this out of my posterior.
Summer of year 6: I see the finish line...but not I'm not done "yet"!
The underlying theme of all these questions is that if I get a total of 4 months off during the year - or so it seems from the outside - and if I only teach 2 classes a semester then why the hell can't I just sit down to write and finish. How do you explain to an outsider that the "real world" gives you time off to take time off but the academic world is better at giving that illusion than actually giving time off? Yes you can take your own little vacation but at the cost of immense guilt and overwhelming stress that 3 days off is likely going to translate into weeks of catching up. There is something exponential about the work you do if you're academicking - by which I mean either working on a PhD while holding down teaching duties or adjuncting in 5 places as a newly minted PhD or in a tenure-track/tenured professorial position.
When school is in session, I think those of us who try to do this decently well, end up spending about 6-7 hours of prep for teaching a single class. That doesn't include grading, office hours, student meetings, e-mail questions, etc. Then there's the in-class performance - you have to go do it even if you're feeling particularly blah - and you have to do it enthusiastically. If you teach 2-3 courses a semester chances are that about 4 days of the week you barely have time to breathe. That leaves 3 days. You catch up on grading and reading and answering student e-mails. You plan ahead for research projects. You get yourselves organized. One day of the week you slow it down or else you'll be too bitchy and burnt out to pick yourself up and get through the next week. There are always disgruntled students to manage who don't do the work, feel like they deserve nothing less than an A+, and are convinced that their poor grades have nothing to do with their performance but your whims and fancies. [I hear women in academia struggle more with this than men and I think that's purely *&^#@( unfair!) Then that summer arrives. O blessed summer! To the world it looks like you aren't going to work. Except - well you're catching up on the last 9 months when you never got enough time to write and writing what you would have written in these 3 months irrespective.
Of course it isn't all dreary. Some of the students are wonderful, sometimes you reach out to particularly difficult students and it pays off after a few times, and the days you have a writing epiphany can be orgasmic in their own way.
The 5/22 issue of The Chronicle has what I think is a great article titled "Did You Publish Today" that explains the rhythms of an academic life for those on the outside. An excerpt from this piece pasted below really capture the essence of what I'm trying to say:
"When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question. This column, I'm sure you realize, dear fellow academics, is not for you. You don't need me to tell you that when you're working it can sometimes look to the rest of the world like you're curled up in front of the fire petting the cat. This column is ....for the people who believe that academics have the summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn't work. This column is for those who think that getting published is as easy as winning the Boston Marathon."
So for all those people who have asked me why I'm still not done here are some responses based on the year of the PhD I was in then:
Years 1,2,&3: Oh come on! Even an undergraduate degree takes 4 years.
Years 4,5, &6: Contrary to popular belief I can't really whip this out of my posterior.
Summer of year 6: I see the finish line...but not I'm not done "yet"!
Friday, March 07, 2008
If only there was a pill...
If you're writing or have ever written a dissertation you might find this particularly funny.
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