Nonetheless, one hard lesson for me is that you have to pick certain technologies and just stick with them.  Not forever, but certainly for the duration of the dissertation.  Changing major technologies mid-project isn’t productive; it’s procrastination.

The more I learn and work with Mendeley, the more I love it.  But I wrote my dissertation using Zotero and OneNote.  Mendeley adds features that basically integrate the two tools, but switching mid-stream would have just been a way to not get the hard work done.  Zotero and OneNote did what was needed to get me through, and now I can take the time to change.  (Of course now that I am done, I’ve discovered that Scrivener is out for PC.  Given the raves I’ve heard from mac people, I may have to try it.)

The point is that there will always be a latest and greatest technology.  The only justification for switching mid-project should be if that technology adds valuable features that you can make use of immediately AND the time-cost of changing is minimal.  It’s fine to upgrade to the latest version of something you already use (as I did with Zotero to make use of it’s syncing feature which gave me location independence), but it’s important to let the bright shiny things wait for a sensible break .  It’s really just procrastination (at which I am something of an expert) and not the best way you can spend your time.

* I bought, used, and loved my Nexus One, the Android phone that was bought sight-unseen from Google.  Then I gave it to my husband and got a Droid Incredible which I immediately rooted (the hard way, before the linked tool was available) and have been running custom ROMs on ever since.  The only reason I still have that is because I MADE myself not trade it out again mid-dissertation.

** I also bought a Nook Color, rooted it and installed Cyanogenmod 7 nightlies on it, because I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting for an actual Android tablet.

In my program, you advance to candidacy when you:

1. Complete and have your comprehensive exams signed off on
2. Complete and have your dissertation proposal signed off on

Of course, our proposal is the first three chapters of our dissertation, written in future tense.  (“This study will do X” rather than “This study did X”.)  I actually think this was the hard part, because those chapters include the literature review and methods.  Once you get those signed off on its all about following the methods you decided on and then writing up the conclusions.  I actually intend to do nearly all of the statistical analysis today and start writing up the results tomorrow.  First draft of the last two chapters will go to my advisor before the end of the month.

I will graduate in May.  I have to.  Chair is leaving on sabbatical for a year (in Spain; lucky bastard) in July, so I need to be done before that.  The end is in sight, and a HUGE weight is already off my shoulders….

If you are an Amazon customer you are probably familiar with Amazon Prime, which for $79 per year gives you free two-day shipping on everything and cheap upgrades to overnight shipping.  My husband and I have had this for years (and in fact it may well be the only reason I ever get all my christmas shopping done before christmas.)

Amazon has created Amazon Student, which is essentially Prime for Free for 1 year for students.  You sign up with your school, major, and a .edu address.  To me this is a great deal, since it saves the fee and lets you get anything amazon sells (books, music, electronics, whatever) in a fraction of the usual time.

Now, of course, if you are a Kindle user this might not be worth that much to you.  (I actually have a Sony eReader, although I use it mostly for casual fiction.  Which I will read again once I finish my dissertation.)  But even a single shipment will recoup the cost (free)!

Any time you feel like you can’t get through your dissertation, go read someone else’s.  I’ve read two tonight.  One makes massively broad claims with only a single citation to back up 10 different points, has the citation for those 10 points wrong, and misunderstands what the cited person was writing so that they paraphrase it incorrectly.  The person they were citing was another dissertation.  It made that first one look high-quality.  The lit review was like a game of buzzword bingo, and just about as deep, their references were uniformly 10-15 years old, there were a lot of “this”‘s and “that”‘s where it was unclear what the writer was referring to, and there were a number of sentences that made no sense at all.

I feel better now.

On the other hand, there is NOTHING specific to the new topic; it appears to be a question no one has asked.  This seems both good and bad; good in that it is certainly a unique contribution, but bad in that there is little in the way of a template to work from.  Which is making it harder to write that outline….

Are there REALLY so many unemployed business PhDs around that an online program can afford to take an MBA, ABD in another field, with 20 years of business experience and a certification in one of their subspecialties, and send them this?