I know, I know. I haven’t been posting too much on here. Or on ELITETRACK for that matter. In fact, even my inbox has been collecting some rare dust over the past 2 weeks. Client call backs are a little more delayed. HPC related business projects are being temporarily postponed.
It’s all for good reason though. I’ve been busting my arse trying to get some serious writing done on my dissertation. Yesterday I finished the final research chapter of my dissertation. As with most things, my fatal optimism and perfectionism got the best of me. Fatal optimism in that I had actually been telling myself “I’ll be done with this today”….for about 3 weeks. Part of the problem was that I ran in to some snags that forced me to redo a big part of it but the delay was also due in large part to my OCD of getting things PERFECT. All in all though, I sent it out to my advisor yesterday afternoon and hopefully won’t have too many revisions to make on it.
Now I just have a conclusion for the three research chapters and then I have to wittle down my literature review a little more and I’m ready for defense. I can’t wait to be finished. I’ve been unusually focused on it the last couple weeks as I’m approaching ‘crunch time.’ The last day I can defend this semester is December 19th and I need to give my 5 member dissertation committee at least 4 weeks to read it before then. So that means if I assume a defense date of the 15th (since no one will likely want to sit through a dissertation defense on the last day of a semester) that means I really need to be done writing some time around a week from today. That’s good and bad. Good because I definitely work better when I’m ‘under the gun.’ Bad in that it leaves me little time for anything else, including errors.