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kareinaFor reasons that would no doubt be of immense interest to a psychoanalysit, but of which I am not consciously aware, the "so what" part of my thesis has been the hardest part for me to approach. Writing the facts about what I've done and what the results were was straightforward, if terribly time consuming (as one might expect when one doesn't really start writing up the results till after three full years worth of research has been conducted--if I ever do another PhD you can bet that I'll be doing writing as I go, rather than waiting till the end again!), but I've had the most difficult time making myself sit down and do is the so-what stuff.
A number of times I tried I'd find myself losing time reading e-mail or livejournal, or paging down through lists of people I may know on Facebook looking for familiar faces. Eventually it occurred to me that the best solution to the problem of not working when I should be was to go back and do work that was still hanging from the earlier chapters. Ah, the safety and comfort of familiar tasks--how easy it is to create new camera-ready figures from the graphs in the spreadsheets, or go back and fix the figure numbers for chapter five (which wound in a very weird order when, at the last minute, after creating all of the figures and making pdfs of them to give my advisor, I suddenly decided that it would make much more sense to present the summary of all the results first, and then the details for each sample--as a result, before I fixed the figure numbers the first figure mentioned in the chapter was #114)!
Alas, with the end of the month approaching far, far too rapidly, it really is necessary for chapter six to be finished as soon as possibe, for without the "conclusion", I can't write an abstract, and without a draft of the abstract the Uni can't start the process of arranging for examiners (which process can take several weeks, I'm told, so is best done well before the final version of thesis is printed and bound). So late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, after enjoying myself at the dance, I finally stumbled upon the solution for how to get me to actually work on that part of the chapter. Months ago my advisor had given me a list of topics he thought I'd best include, and a stack of papers I should consult. I read the papers at the time, and have looked at a few of them again whilst not actually writing anything for the chapter. This time I looked at the list, opened the chapter, and added a heading for "papers I still need to cite", and listed those papers there. Then choose one at random, opened it, and skimmed through it looking for stuff that was relevant to my results, and came up with something I could type, and typed it. This gave me almost 400 new words yesterday! Today I spent some time incorporating yet more edits into chapter five (because I'd written yet more new stuff for that chapter afterktmcg edited it for me, I took ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katerit's offer to edit up as well, and sent it off to her and she'd returned it), and then I managed another couple hundred words for chapter six.
So now I can claim one chapter (5) really done, the first draft of chapter 6 (discussion and conclusions) nearly done (I hope--it will take some cleaning up--right now there are random paragraph bits just sitting here and there, with no lining paragraphs to tie them together, and no decision yet as to the order in which they should be presented, and, I think, there are a few more of those to write before I've covered everything, but, at least, that part is finally happening--such a relief!), and then once that is done and I'm waiting for my advisor to get it back to me there are corrections to make to chapters 1-4 before the whole thing is completely done. The calendar says I've got two weeks to accomplish all that and have it printed as well if I want it bound and ready to submit before I fly out for West Kingdom June Crown. Tickets have been tentatively booked (but, alas, I don't know the details--my travel agent has had a family emergency and took a moment to e-mail me to say "booked on the dates you requested", but didn't have time to type more than that, so I'll have to talk to someone else in the company sometime this week to find out more information). However, I'm thinking that until I've sent chapter six to my advisor for comment, I'm safer to not firm those tickets up by paying for them...
It is now nearly 7 am, I've enjoyed another night of working and am thinking it might be time to go for a walk, do some yoga and get a bit of sleep before returning to the chapter at hand this evening (which will feel like a new day, given the sleep schedule I've gotten myself onto).
A number of times I tried I'd find myself losing time reading e-mail or livejournal, or paging down through lists of people I may know on Facebook looking for familiar faces. Eventually it occurred to me that the best solution to the problem of not working when I should be was to go back and do work that was still hanging from the earlier chapters. Ah, the safety and comfort of familiar tasks--how easy it is to create new camera-ready figures from the graphs in the spreadsheets, or go back and fix the figure numbers for chapter five (which wound in a very weird order when, at the last minute, after creating all of the figures and making pdfs of them to give my advisor, I suddenly decided that it would make much more sense to present the summary of all the results first, and then the details for each sample--as a result, before I fixed the figure numbers the first figure mentioned in the chapter was #114)!
Alas, with the end of the month approaching far, far too rapidly, it really is necessary for chapter six to be finished as soon as possibe, for without the "conclusion", I can't write an abstract, and without a draft of the abstract the Uni can't start the process of arranging for examiners (which process can take several weeks, I'm told, so is best done well before the final version of thesis is printed and bound). So late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, after enjoying myself at the dance, I finally stumbled upon the solution for how to get me to actually work on that part of the chapter. Months ago my advisor had given me a list of topics he thought I'd best include, and a stack of papers I should consult. I read the papers at the time, and have looked at a few of them again whilst not actually writing anything for the chapter. This time I looked at the list, opened the chapter, and added a heading for "papers I still need to cite", and listed those papers there. Then choose one at random, opened it, and skimmed through it looking for stuff that was relevant to my results, and came up with something I could type, and typed it. This gave me almost 400 new words yesterday! Today I spent some time incorporating yet more edits into chapter five (because I'd written yet more new stuff for that chapter after
ktmcg edited it for me, I took katerit's offer to edit up as well, and sent it off to her and she'd returned it), and then I managed another couple hundred words for chapter six. So now I can claim one chapter (5) really done, the first draft of chapter 6 (discussion and conclusions) nearly done (I hope--it will take some cleaning up--right now there are random paragraph bits just sitting here and there, with no lining paragraphs to tie them together, and no decision yet as to the order in which they should be presented, and, I think, there are a few more of those to write before I've covered everything, but, at least, that part is finally happening--such a relief!), and then once that is done and I'm waiting for my advisor to get it back to me there are corrections to make to chapters 1-4 before the whole thing is completely done. The calendar says I've got two weeks to accomplish all that and have it printed as well if I want it bound and ready to submit before I fly out for West Kingdom June Crown. Tickets have been tentatively booked (but, alas, I don't know the details--my travel agent has had a family emergency and took a moment to e-mail me to say "booked on the dates you requested", but didn't have time to type more than that, so I'll have to talk to someone else in the company sometime this week to find out more information). However, I'm thinking that until I've sent chapter six to my advisor for comment, I'm safer to not firm those tickets up by paying for them...
It is now nearly 7 am, I've enjoyed another night of working and am thinking it might be time to go for a walk, do some yoga and get a bit of sleep before returning to the chapter at hand this evening (which will feel like a new day, given the sleep schedule I've gotten myself onto).
