GRIT: A psychologist has come up with a painfully simple 12 question instrument to determine whether someone has the stick-to-it-ive-ness to finish something great.  She calls it GRIT.  See Getting Things Done in Academia (newly reawoken) to understand a bit more and follow this link to the instrument itself.  I got a 4 out of 5, meaning I have quite a lot of Grit.  Hardly a surprise.

SPITE:  In contrast, Post-Academic in NYC talks about the power of SPITE to drive you through the completion of your dissertation.  I could empathize here, since there was an extent to which I finished to prove a particular full professor wrong.  I’m pretty sure he told people I would never finish, and that pisses me off.

I’m not quite as bitter as Post-Academic, and I don’t know that spite alone could have gotten me through if I hadn’t had grit as well.  Grit was the part of me that said “You said you were going to do this, so DO IT.”  Spite was just the gleeful voice in the back of my head that wanted to rub his nose in it.

P.S.  The universe gave me a graduation present this summer.  I was asked to review an article on a topic I know something about.  I agreed.  When it showed up, it was clearly the latest edition of an ongoing series of reports by aforementioned full professor.  I shredded it.  Not maliciously, but because he had failed to support any of his assertions with research or facts, and I called him on every single one.  It was cathartic.

What I didn’t realize as I went through these permutations was that the tools needed to manage coursework were different from the tools needed to manage the dissertation.

Even with my project management certification, the dissertation was the biggest SOLO project I have ever executed.  A book is comparable.  Parts of the process can translate – for example it is critical to break the dissertation into sub-parts in order to make it a workable task, which is the same for any project from a course paper to cleaning the bathroom.  But the timeframe and VOLUMES of material you have to keep straight are very different.

During my coursework I could carve my day into pieces and usually cross at least one thing off by the end of a piece. I tried to do something similar with the dissertation and found it didn’t work so well. Admittedly I could “read and take notes on article X” in a chunk of allocated time.  But that didn’t help me integrate article X with articles Y, Z, and A through F on the same topic.  That integration time was much harder to schedule, since sometimes it came easily and other times it didn’t.

In the end, from a productivity perspective, I blocked off chunks of time (ranging from an hour to a day) and then put together a goal list at the start of each session.  Planning those goals in advance didn’t work; I needed to take into account my mood, my level of energy, and most importantly what I had completed the last session.

At the same time certain planning became easier.  I no longer needed to maintain a complex, detailed schedule of my days because I was no longer running from work to class to teaching to homework to somewhere else at top speed.  Class was no longer in the picture, and there really was only one “homework” assignment to be worked.

When you move out of coursework and in to writing your dissertation, you need to revisit your tools and systems.  Accept that the requirements have changed and therefore the system needs to change as well.  For some people, that will mean setting aside a dedicated hour or two per day to work on the dissertation while for others it may be setting aside a day or two per week where you focus on that.  Organizing the other elements of your life around these times will may require a different approach or it may be just a different way of using what you have.  Regardless, taking that step back and revisiting your system will help you make the best use of your time.

One of my bigger mistakes was setting aside things like eating right and working out regularly while I worked on my dissertation.  I am INCREDIBLY lucky that at 45, despite being fat all my life (size 22), my cholesterol has been good, my blood sugar normal, my resting heart rate is very low (55-60), I breathe 2 times to my husband’s 3 breaths, and my blood pressure is normal.  I had blood drawn earlier this week and those things are still the case; normal thyroid, blood sugar, cholesterol, iron, and all that good stuff.

During the course of writing my dissertation, however, I put back the 60 lbs I had previously lost.  I had kept the weight off for 2 years before starting the dissertation but now am right back where I was before.  So I get to diet again until I lose that weight.  It was hard enough the first time.

I took my cruiser bike out on sunday for the first time in ages.  No pressure, not a speed thing, just ride for 30 minutes.  Cardio-wise, that was no problem.  But my legs started to burn before I got out of my cul-de-sac (It’s only 3 houses long).  The road bike (on which I used to go for 2 hour rides for fun, and maxed out at 5 hours) is staying in the garage for at least a couple of weeks until I can make it a bit further before the burn starts.

Working full-time while working on the dissertation made it very hard for me to keep in perspective the fact that this was a marathon and not a sprint.  I felt rushed to try to get done, and as such kept sacrificing things like exercise, cooking decent food [note: popcorn is not a meal] and paying attention to my weight.  I appear to have dodged a bullet, as the effects are primarily in terms of my clothing size and not my health, but I am likely an exception.

This is a slow, time-consuming process that will take a while.  If you keep up your exercise habits and eat well, it might take a little while longer.  That’s OK.  This is also a stressful process and keeping up your health and fitness will help reduce that stress.  If I could do it again, not only would I not have stopped those things but I would have added yoga to the mix in order to deal with stress.  Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

(Think about it this way:  if you are concerned about the extra money that additional time in grad school might cost, you can either pay that money to the school or to Old Navy for new clothing as your size changes.  Your choice.  I’m pretty sure it comes out about the same…..)

Seriously.  After some troubleshooting, it turned out that the raid controller built into my motherboard had committed suicide, making none of my 3 internal drives visible.

Now, a month and a half before graduation (knowing there would be at least one more round of revisions), this should have caused a panic.  It didn’t.  Why?

1. I have copies of all the key dissertation files in dropbox
2. I have copies of my entire Documents folder on the external backup drive, along with my itunes library
3. I have copies of my entire Documents folder backed up using crashplan

- apply for (and pay for) graduation

- apply for the masters in passing that really should be automatic

- RSVP for commencement (i.e. emotionally commit to paying for the stupid robes that I will wear 1 time and then put in the back of the closet along with my wedding dress.  At least they won’t cost as much.)

- fill out the Survey of Earned Doctorates

Boy, did doing that LAST one make it suddenly feel real.

I admit I’m an abnormal doctoral candidate.  I’m not really concerned about standing in front of my committee and defending my work, since I know what I did, why I did each step, and feel confident that (while I could have substantially lengthened and complicated it) it fits together as a single unit of solid research.  I’m NOT confident that the way I WROTE it will meet their requirements, especially given the fact that one doesn’t like my writing style.

But since I’m back to waiting again, I guess I’ll do something vaguely productive.  Like my taxes.  Or grading.  Or whatever it is that normal people do when they aren’t constantly working.  (Anyone want to clue me in as to what that is?  I can’t remember….)

The Bad: Despite my clearly telling him that most of my work time was on weekends, he got it back to me at 8:30pm on the Monday of a long weekend.  So I took a vacation day today (my least busy work day) in order to work on it.  If it’s going to take him nearly a month to respond, I want to make sure he has all the time that he needs by getting my parts done as quickly as possible.

The Ugly:  While the numbers appear fine, he has some issues with the organization.  Rightly so to some extent; it wasn’t until I started to look at the data that I realized what a big impact the missing data would have.  (Some of my variables have as much as 35% missing data, and logistic regression by default just drops the entire record.  Additionally the group who is missing is different from the group that has the variables completed, suggesting that I can’t generalize from the subset that has complete data to the broader population.)

So, now I go back through it, looking at his comments and hoping I can fix this quickly enough to not have to delay graduation.

I am now deep in to the “hurry up and wait” phase of my dissertation. At the beginning of January my chair finally signed off on my proposal, and if I want to graduate in May I needed to get him a draft of the results and discussion chapters by the end of January.  I did, working nearly every minute I wasn’t at my day job, and sent it to him literally at 10pm on the 31st.

Now I wait until he gets around to reading it, putting in comments, and sending it back to me.  There isn’t a lot of sense in continuing to work on anything, since he may come back with a direction that will make any work done irrelevant.  I’ve arranged for an editor/formatter, verified all the key dates (to the editor by March 15th, apply to graduate and turn in document for format review March 31st, defend around April 15th) and tried (several times) to get my chair to at least acknowledge that he received the document and give me a tentative date.  I need to know so that I can arrange time off for that last final push to get the dumb thing done and back to him for review at least one more time before the editor.

Now, I believe my results chapter is pretty good.  Or rather it is every bit as dull and repetitive as it needs to be, thorough about explaining what I did and why, and covers all the things I found.  There is an infinite amount of additional digging I could be doing, but that starts to get out of control fast.

Unfortunately I didn’t find what I had hoped was there, which made the discussion a bit more difficult.  I tried, but expect to get a lot of comments back on that and some on the results.  But that’s why I worry that he might suggest a direction change, in which case this is going to take a lot of time.

In the meantime, I took care of all that girly maintenance stuff – eyebrow wax, facial, pedicure, haircut.  And a little shopping.  It was enjoyable, but one weekend was enough.  If Chair hasn’t gotten back to me before next weekend I’m going to start getting really antsy….

So I’m trying to run the logistic regressions today.  First I put each of the most promising set of variables in individually.  When you do a logistic regression in SPSS it’s base model is to look at the distribution of the outcome variable.  If more than 50% have the outcome variable, guess all have it.  If less, guess none have it.  For me this makes a blind guess around 70% correct.

The ONLY version of the model that adds anything substantive (around 10% better prediction) uses the two variables that you get latest in the process – like at the same time you get the outcome variable.  Specifically you can make a better guess as to whether someone will need placement into remedial math if you know whether they needed to be placed in remedial reading or writing.  Unfortunately that’s a bit too late to do anything about the situation.

All of the other potentially predictive variables, including high school GPA, math test scores at two different points, math self-efficacy, or demographic stuff, fails to add more than 0.1% to the predictiveness of the model.  Worse, some of these actually reduce it by up to 0.7%.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong here….I mean, I didn’t expect a nobel prize for this thing, but I expected to find something.  People do it all the time.  I have to assume I’m doing something wrong…..I just don’t know what…