I turned in chapters 6 and 7 last Sunday evening. Chapters 1-5 are completely finished, this is the second draft of chapter 7, and the first of chapter 6. It’s awesome to have everything at least in draft form for the first time. It’s a whole dissertation. I’ve gone through my 1000+ footnotes and my huge bibliography every day this week as a kind of nervous tick. I really, really hope that I am close to the end. After 7 years in the program and 3 on the dissertation, I am ready to be done. I spent a lot of time on it but I have done good work.
I am now working on the final chapter of the dissertation. It feels great to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m still in the odd beginnings of a chapter. With any luck I’ll be done by Feb 1, revise for a month, and defend in April, graduate in May. I’ve taken the scenic route – this is my seventh year. But there are a few others who started with me who haven’t graduated yet. That’s some comfort.
After the first of the year my wife and I are both going to start looking for jobs and plan where we want to live.
Exciting stuff.
I had a miracle week back in Feb 2011. In one week I wrote chapters 5-8 without footnotes. But I had to finish chapter four, which took several months. Now it appears that I only wrote about 2/3 of chapter 5 – my adviser is requiring some more sections. I’ve drafted this and I’m revising it now.
I feel like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing and it’s slowing down the daily grind. Meeting with adviser tomorrow, hopefully that will give me some direction.
Today I am relaunching my blog with a new URL – nathanbarnes.us. Somehow the domain folks didn’t get my renewal processed correctly, and my old URL nathanjohnbarnes.com was already taken by the time I realized what was up.
I’ve deleted some obsolete pages and refreshed everything else. This site may need a little more polish, but I’ll try to keep a closer eye on things.
To my reader: you are the best!
