I have been going back and forth with my advisor during December, trying to get him to sign off on my changes from the proposal review so that I can finally say that part is done.  One change outstanding.  Of course, it’s not an insignificant change.

In the meantime I submitted the grant proposal.  I should hear in late February.  I also got caught up on all the blogs I like to read, slept in, played with my dogs and watched all the episodes so far of The Walking Dead.  I also cooked and baked a lot, with mixed success.  (Well, everything was edible, but only some of the recipes are going to get made again.)  There was something else big in there, but right now I can’t remember what.  {I remember!  I got the next semester’s stats class set up, which involves moving to an online homework system and therefore took quite a lot of work.  Whew.  I’m too young for senior moments….}

In an effort to provide some value to anyone reading, I stumbled on an interesting blog post about Logistic Regression today.  Since I’m using it in my dissertation, it was important to me but it also provides a good easy to digest explanation, which is not something I had come across before.  If you might need it or just want to know what the heck it is (and how to interpret the SPSS output), take a quick read.  She’s funny.

Back to work with me.  I made the mistake of doing a search for a small fact to add to my lit review at my chair’s request and stumbled on an entire dissertation written in June related to my topic.  *SIGH* now I have to read it.  Meh.  If I can get the revised lit review signed off I can be officially ABD and actually register for the spring semester, AND be at Inbox Zero in my gmail account for the first time in forever.  (I do pretty well at work but have the holiday’s worth of crud to clear out Monday in order to get back to it.)

Anyone who has spent time in the regular job market and looked for a job has heard the old saw that more than half of the jobs are filled through the “unofficial” job market; someone knows someone else, who puts them in touch with the right person who is hiring for a job, etc, etc, etc. I knew this to be true, but frankly suck at networking so had never had it work for me.

Then came LinkedIn, a site designed to make us all just a bit better at networking. I have what can only be called a schizophrenic presence there, with links to friends in the IT industry, co-workers from my day job, a few academic colleagues and some other random acquaintances that seemed to make sense. I never thought much about it. However over christmas break, it thought about me.

I received an email from a 2nd level contact looking for someone who knew statistics, maybe some finance, and might be interested in a position in financial planning and analysis. I’ve been struggling with the overwhelming mismatch between my day job and my academic interests/goals for some time but have been too high up in my day job to walk away for a graduate assistants salary, especially now that husband has joined the ranks of the underemployed. But I called the guy back to find out more about the position due to a deep dissatisfaction with my day job. I mean, heck; I have an MBA, I know some finance, I know statistics (I teach it)….why not talk to him. I found out he was recruiting for a fairly high level financial modeling position with a higher ed organization, who were fascinated by the combination of my education, technical skills (IT and statistics), and business skills.

Over the past month, all my spare time was spent either interviewing or studying for the interviews. (NOTE: I don’t care HOW senior you are in a field, you always study for your interviews; if nothing else you learn about that organization and refresh your knowledge on the items they are specifically interested in.) And I got it. Negligible salary change, but I will be working in the industry I know and love, doing something marginally different from what my career has been for the last 15 years, and focused on issues I’m passionate about.

The new organization wants me to work initially on a predictive revenue model. But in essence a revenue model for a college is an enrollment model; grant funding is handled separately. Questions that play into this model include:

• Why do students stop taking classes?  What factors are most significant in the decision?
• Are there things in a students record that would allow us to predict which ones will persist and which ones won’t?  Are there interventions that can be made to change the predicted outcome?
• Are there external factors (the economy, for instance) that drive enrollment behaviors, and in what way?
• How do these things vary by major?  By number of credits completed so far?  By level of degree (Associates vs Bachelors vs Masters vs Doctoral)

So now, rather than working on my lit review as I had intended, I am reviewing financial modeling, teaching myself SAS (they use SAS instead of SPSS), and scanning the existing literature on higher education enrollment to make sure I don’t miss any key factors that have been found by researchers so far.

To me, this is time well spent.  It ties loosely into my dissertation (and given my lack of data may result in a sensible change of dissertation direction to something related to persistence), but more importantly puts me in the position that seems so necessary to finishing; being steeped in the environment that you are studying.  Unlike a standard corporation, these folks are excited by my slightly academic take on the problem and my knowledge of current events in the industry.

I expect the next couple of months to see a revision of my organizational strategies, as well as a the promised review of Demystifying Dissertation Writing and my ongoing attempts to improve my teaching skills .  My guess is that the productivity revisions will come first, as the bipolar life I’ve been leading comes to an end and my jobs and academic interests begin to intertwine.  I can’t even begin to express how much I am looking forward to that!

This month has been difficult; at my “day job” (non-academic) I have survived 2 rounds of layoffs and watched many dear friends and colleagues lose their jobs the week before christmas.  The MBA in me knows why the company is doing it (if you can live on your cash flow right now you will emerge out the other side in much better shape) but I am convinced they are choosing where to make the cuts in a painfully short-sighted manner.  They cut 2 major departments, the six-sigma quality analysts (who could save them millions if people would listen) and are shutting down sites that, frankly, they will never get reopened because of their remote locations.  I am having a bout of survivors guilt mingled with relief; we aren’t financially ready for me to be unemployed.

I’ve also faced the fact this month that we aren’t going to be financially ready for me to take a 50% cut in pay (what I would take for an academic job) for a long time, and maybe never.  I make a comfortable living now, and frankly we are used to it; we like the stuff that money can buy, the lifestyle we have.  So can I or should I bother to write a dissertation to get a job we may not be able to (or willing to) afford for me to have?

On positive notes, I am teaching a section of statistics at the community college next semester.  I enjoy it.  My husband keeps reminding me that it would take only a little work (a few classes) to become qualified to teach Psychology as well and community colleges can keep me busy with those two pretty much forever.  I am considering it; my thought process goes like this:  If all goes as planned by the end of spring I should be done with my Comps, although getting that and my proposal done while working 50 hours a week and teaching a class are kind of iffy.  I could, however, take 2 classes per semester in psychology for summer, fall and spring while taking a 1 credit “continuous enrollment” in my program and have solid teaching credentials for a community college.  It would delay my dissertation by a year, which is no big deal since I can’t afford to graduate and change jobs yet anyway.  If I wait until fall to start those classes I can probably do my proposal over the summer and technically be ABD for that year as well.

We’ll see – no decisions yet.  Just ideas floating around in my head.

For today, it’s Christmas Eve.  I need to CLEAN!  We’re having 8 (out of 10) of our closest friends over tomorrow for Christmas Dinner and the state of disarray that we live with really won’t work for entertaining.  (I’m making Prime Rib; the thing is huge and it was EXPENSIVE!  But it will be amazing!!!)  I also have some errands to run (which I may do first – the cleaning is feeling kind of overwhelming right now.

Then tonight I’m making Duck with a Pomegranate Wine sauce and Mashed Potatoes for dinner; we have tons of cookies for desert.  Then PRESENTS!  (I still get excited like a kid about gifts, but we like to sleep in.  Since we have no kids, opening on Christmas Eve works for us.)

Enjoy your holidays!

Hugo over at the Streamlined Mind included me on his list of worthwhile student productivity blogs, which I really appreciate.  Further, he pointed out that somewhere in fiddling with the format I had lost the About information on this blog.  It’s back on the sidebar.  (Mental note: less time on the format, more time on the CONTENT!)

I also read almost every one of the other blogs Hugo references.  Check out his list; it’s a great place to start.

Cory at Thoughts on Education Policy has been posting some, well, interesting thoughts on education policy, including what some of the OTHER education blogs are talking about.

Sherman Dorn is an experienced academic historian of education who posts on ed policy and his own academic process.  His insights are great, but I have really appreciated his posts on putting together a class for this summer.  His thoughts on how to structure the class, its goals and what to include (and not include) have proven helpful to me in how I think about creating a new course.

Finally, the Jen Beckman 20×200 project is a really neat concept; you can get prints of original artwork for $20 – we’ve bought a couple already and I keep thinking that if this had been around when I was an undergrad I would have had far fewer generic posters on my walls.  Etsy.com is also great for inexpensive, unique art.  It’s not productivity or education, but aethetics are nonetheless an important consideration in staying happy, healthy and centered.

I can’t bring myself to completely drop the feeds; many have done important things for my thinking, my finances and my emotional stability.  However I did spend a bit of time cleaning my RSS house today.

There are a lot of academic blogs that I adore; faculty and graduate students talking about their experiences that has helped me really think about both academic and emotional issues.  There are a few consumer/finance blogs that have given me good information (consumerist.com is definitely one of the best).  I read a pile of organization and GTD blogs, and a couple of  philosophy blogs as well.

But today I dropped more than half of my list.  The only category that escaped pruning was academic blogs because, frankly, most of those are pretty low-traffic.  On the other hand I trimmed the organization, finance, religion, and a few others very heavily.

The only way I can do everything I need to over the next few months is by focusing on things that are important, but that doesn’t mean dropping things entirely.  It is important for my thinking to be exposed to other ideas and I am reluctant to give it up.

However the ones I don’t have time for are gone.  The ones with a bad signal to noise ratio are gone.  And some of the ones that are iffy are now in a category of their own that I can “mark all as read” if I don’t have time.

I’m going to trim even more over time, but I’m feeling good about this first step.  I want to get the best use of my time, andthat includes recreational blog-reading time.

I will continue blogging despite being hopelessly busy.  I will do this for several reasons:

1. writing of ANY sort is a good thing.
2. it helps me process things that are going on, whether they are worries about my schedule or new concepts that are coming up in my work or reading
3. i have gotten some amazingly helpful comments to posts and hope those will continue

I will admit that this blog is taking on a more personal tone than I had originally intended.  I’m OK with that.  I read a whole pile of personal blogs from other academics and frankly it is helping me in my journey.  Maybe this one will help someone else.

Or maybe I’ll just post pictures of my dogs….

This is Riley – he died about a year ago from Lymphoma at age 6.5.  He was the first dog I ever raised from a puppy, and the sweetest, most gentle dog you ever want to meet.  I still miss him.

I’ve skimmed through maybe 5 blogs on my list so far this morning and already come across the following blog posts directly related to my field of education policy:

Outside the (toy)box wrote about schoolhouse commercialism, a major topic for one of the faculty at my school.
Uncertain principles wrote about the conflicts regarding whether American schools are really as bad as some people want to say they are.

I responded to both.

And that’s all before I got to read via RSS the debate going on between Gerald Bracey and Diane Ravitch over on Huffington Post about the supression of a report back in the early 90s.  (These two have been at it for 15+ years, but the fact is they both misstate the other, overstate or underplay things and in general represent opposite ends of a spectrum with the truth likely to be somewhere in the middle.)

What a day….

And it’s still early….