After a great deal of running around today my fellowship application has been submitted. Via fax. If I don’t get a confirmation email tomorrow I will send it again, but so far so good. I did all that running around on my bike, so I probably rode 25 miles today. If only that were a 1-to-1 ratio with pounds lost – I could be a size 8 in no time…
My new GTD implementation is working really well. I showed it to the other girls in my writing group yesterday and was told that (in my copious spare time) I should market the idea. That’s work and time that I don’t have. Instead, later this week I will take pictures and explain what I’ve done so that someone who wants to can replicate it themselves.
After talking to my writing group about my ideas I have definitely dropped both the history and the case study ideas as either unemployable (unfortunately) or unworkable in a realistic time frame. Plus I just don’t have the required personality to be a qualitative researcher. Now I need to learn more about content/text analysis….
Finally, Cal left a very important comment under my Life’s Work post:
impression I get from my various academic mentors is more short-term.
Find a rich topic that you can keep returning to for a couple years.
This gets you through grad school. You can change it later. And
probably will.
This is absolutely the case. I was caught up in the moment and passion of a ton of other grad students, which somehow managed to leave me with a small case of “imposter syndrome”. It happens. I’m over it for the most part.
What is interesting to me is that the advice that Cal’s mentors are providing is similar to the “starter dough” idea that my mentor has been suggesting to me. Find something you can get a half dozen papers out of and run with it. So that’s what I’m going to focus on. Thanks Cal!
ProtoScholar 