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….