I spent most of tuesday and wednesday nights pulling together some data for my adviser and a paper he is working on with another group of people.  I was tasked with pulling the descriptive statistics for both “treatment” and control groups.  (We aren’t actually treating anyone; this is looking at a distinct subgroup of students and comparing them to a ‘matched’ group in historical data.)  Before I could do that I had to distinguish the two groups, which in one case meant some complicated data manipulations. 

It just KILLS me that so many academics try to make one tool do anything.  Case in point.  All of the above data manipulation was done in SPSS.  SPSS is NOT a data management tool.  In fact, it’s not very good at it at all.  But all of the data is in flat files and everyone wants stuff too quickly for me to ever properly load it into a relational database from which I can get the information I need easily.  So instead of writing a simple query to get the flags I needed I had to screw around with SPSS merge functions.  It took hours.  It was tedious.  I could have been done in minutes if it had been in a real database, but since I’m apparently the only one in my field that knows how to write a SQL statement  I can never convince anyone to give me the TIME to do it right.

I don’t even know if I’ll get a thank you on that paper, let alone an author credit.  Seeing as how I’ve done all the scut work with the data so far a thank you would be nice.  I’m not involved in the conceptualization of the paper, however, so unless they get me involved in the writing process (unlikely because I get the feeling there are too many cooks on this one already) the best I can hope for is a footnote….

Anyway, I got that done, then spent last night pulling together all the paperwork necessary to refinance our house.  Our rate is a bit high and we can drop it by over a point right now, so that is in process.  I faxed it all off this morning from work where there is a nice FAST fax machine.  (We have an all-in-one with fax capabilities at home, but if I had tried to fax 26 pages of supporting documentation from there last night it would still be working on it…)  Now to hope and pray that our kitchen remodel has compensated for any drop in the market since last June (when it was appraised for the cash-out refinance to do the remodel) so that we can keep our 80% loan to value…. 

Make Your Own Album Cover
1. Click on this link. The title of the page is the name of your band.
2. Click on this link. The last four words of the final quotation on the page are the title of your album.
3. Click on this link. The third picture is your album cover.
4. Add your band name and title to the picture.

( I really need to make that quote my motto somehow…)

* By a little, I mean I had Lasik surgery 10 years ago and see pretty darn well at a distance.  However I appear to be acquiring (or worsening) the astigmatism in one eye and BOTH need reading glasses now.  The unevenness of the two eyes has been contributing to my headaches.  So the idea is to fix that and have reading classes right there when I need them.  Technically my distance vision is still very good, but I can see the difference between the two eyes and it’s bugging me.

Which is making it difficult for me to think about Chair’s shooting down of my latest idea.

I have been trying since May to come up with what he refers to as “starter dough”; an idea that I can use for my dissertation but also pursue after that; a research vein that can be mined for 4-6 articles; an idea on which to build a career.

I have been utterly failing at this goal.

He blames it in part on my unwillingness to completely ignore access to data in formulating my questions.  He thinks I should come up with the question first and then find or build a data set.

Every time I try that I find myself headed toward more qualitative questions and, therefore, away from my strengths.  Questions about what is going on don’t appear “deep” enough to be more than a paper or two, while questions about why it is happening turn rapidly qualitative. 

I just don’t think I think like an academic yet.  Still.

How was today supposed to go?

• Up between 8 and 9
• Go for a bike ride (exercise)
• Shower
• At my desk and working by 11
• Lots of time to get things done…

How today is ACTUALLY going?

• Lay in bed with covers over head until12:30
• Shower
• Put on dark sunglasses to run to the drug store for diet coke to go with the excedrine and sudafed
• Come home and try to cook something to eat
• Find out the something we were cooking contains an ingredient we’re allergic to
• Cook something else
• Get to desk around 2:10
• Remain unable to concentrate due to lingering headache

Classes start this week.  So much for getting some stuff out of the way before that happens….

• Happy Thanksgiving! 
• Jon is working this year, so I didn’t cook.  It was strange.  I made cheesecakes anyway, just so I wouldn’t feel too left out.  I should have some later.
• The best productivity tip I have for today is that, for goodness sake, STAY HOME TOMORROW.  Seriously, the amount of time you spend in lines with grumpy people will never balance out the money you save.  Stay home and shop on Amazon.
• I got to fill out an Arbitron Radio Ratings thing for this past week.  Turns out I mostly listen to my clock radio in the morning (specifically hard/alternative rock), books on tape in the car and internet classical radio while I work.  However the adhesive to close the thing for sending back tastes VILE.
• I’ve taken 21 hours of research methods classes.  That almost makes me more of a statistician than an education policy geek. 
• I really need to break up the rest of this weekend and determine how much time I will spend on each of my key projects.  I have all day friday (8 hrs), all day saturday (8 hrs), half a day on sunday (4 hrs) and all day monday (8 hrs) .  24 hours total, or so.  The projects are as follows:
• Final paper for curriculum class – est 8 hrs
• History of Ed Conference proposal(s) – rewrite – est 2 hrs
• Reading for next thursday’s curriculum class – est 2 hrs
• Begin work on paper for accepted conference proposal – est 4 hrs
• Review of philosophy of school choice paper – est 2 hrs
• Look for online adjunct teaching jobs and apply – est 1 hrs per day
• Read other materials – whatever is left (which doesn’t look like any)
• Take transcription test for competitive intelligence job. – est 2 hrs.
• That last one is interesting – I have a line on a job working from home doing technology competitive intelligence, which (in case you didn’t know) is an awful lot like qualitative research.  Your job is to call companies and get them to tell you the non-confidential information that they would tell a prospective client.  You are basically doing interviews and writing them up.  The potentially evil part of this is that you pretend to be a legit pre-sales contact for them when you aren’t, using an established/approved cover story.  However part of me is fascinated by the idea of practicing my qualitative skills while making money off my old career, from home. 

I cried a bunch before bed last night.  Jon finally brought me half an ambien so that I would sleep. 

My career success has been a BIG part of my self-image for a long time.  And I know full well that my skills, intelligence and competence aren’t going away.  But somehow it all feels like a big hit.

 I don’t yet have either a job (external  validation) or a self-concept (internal) as a scholar/academic.  So it feels very much like I am going from being something to being nothing specific.  How am I supposed to think of myself as a scholar if I don’t have the chance to live the life of a scholar?

Couple that with money fears and the whole thing gets ugly and makes me cry.  I had it under control for much of the evening, but it all came out around bedtime.

My major internal client at my day job is now freaking out about losing me.  But his solution is “take 6 months off from school, do this full time, then revisit”.  I don’t really want to.  The fact is that the parts of this job that don’t bore me to tears annoy the crap out of me.  I don’t like it or want to be here.  The people are bland or annoying, the work is dull or annoying, and as my husband said last night, I’ll just come home cranky every night.

But if money is going to be the driving force of our life then, realistically, I should quit the PhD program and go back to making money.  Part of why I wanted to get a PhD is the lifestyle, but money is part of lifestyle too…. I have the skills, education, and qualifications to make quite a LOT of money. 

I guess the biggest part of the problem here is that we weren’t done preparing monetarily for this time and the part of my self-image that comes from my work is in limbo.  Combine that with a high level of risk aversion and it starts to make staying and slowing/stalling school sound like a good plan.  But then what have I been working toward?