The Endnote thing

So I've mentioned that I don't use Endnote, or any other reference manager. Before you all go apeshit on me, I will say that I recognize that it's the 21st century and that I am missing out on a real convenience by not using reference-managing software. But here's why I don't: I'm lazy.

I keep pdf copies of all my papers in one giant folder. They are labeled by author and year with a few keywords, and despite the fact that this folder now has hundreds of papers, I seem to be able to manage it.

I finally got a copy of Endnote several years into grad school. For a while, I made an effort to build a library with all the papers I had. I was pretty excited about it, but I soon decided it was a pain in the ass to transfer my makeshift pdf system to Endnote. And then I lost interest. And then I got a new-to-me computer that didn't have Endnote. I didn't think to ask for it, and that meant that I couldn't throw my dissertation references into it at the last minute.

Perhaps more importantly, I get a lovely sense of satisfaction from manually building the reference list for each paper. The gradually accruing list is like a progress meter for the paper. Look at how much I've written! Look at how many papers I've read! Look at how thorough I am! Ha-ha!

Admitedly, the big pdf file is starting to get a little out of hand now. I will probably spend some time sorting something out before I get hot and heavy into a post-doc. I downloaded Zotero a few months ago, but I didn't take the time to figure out how to use it. Since it seems I'm not committed to anything, so I'm open to suggestions!

RBOC

So I had a nice weekend laying around, hanging out with friends, and drinking lots of wine. I now give you bullets.

• EGM complained that "the tide was out" when I handed him the tea I made for him. I guess that means it wasn't full enough. Whatev.
  
• One of my thesis chapters is very controversial in my sub-subfield. We're hoping to avoid a steel-cage death match by sending it to our "competitor" to review before we submit it for real. Research Advisor wants to do this before Christmas. Can it please happen that quickly? I reallyreallyreally don't want that paper to linger.
• I think I might have a post-doc to start in early spring. Yay! It's still not for sure yet, so more on this later.
• We're going to visit my family for Thanksgiving. I'm really looking forward to it, as I haven't seen nearly enough of my family this year. Friday I'm going to spend the day watching movies with S2. I always spend the day after Thanksgiving with S2, and some years others come along to make it a very intense, yet fun day. I think this year will be very chill.
• Have you seen that show Modern Family? I haven't seen it every week, but from what I have seen, it's hilarious.
  
• BFF had a death in her family, which makes me sad.
  

Ding-dong the diss. is done!

I emailed it a little while ago, and posted a printed copy to my out-of-state committee member!

My sister sent a wonderful surprise! A gift basket with champagne, chocolates, cheese and crackers, and fancy nuts. And it happened to come while I was home, which is awesome because it turns into a huge clusterfuck when we miss a FedEx package. It totally made my day. Well, that and finishing my motherfucking dissertation!!!

I still have to hand out hard copies (which were f'ing expensive at Kinko's so I only had three done; I will print the rest at work and then pay just to get them bound), but it's getting too late to do that today. I doubt anyone will mind getting that next week, or even after Thanksgiving, and I will still get to say they had the dissertation three weeks in advance. Whatever, I am so relieved.

Now let's hope that they like it!

I'm off to party!

No planning

So most of you agree that I'm nuts for not using Endnote or something like it. I have another confession related to organizational conveniences: I have never, ever consistently used a planner or calendar. I just can't seem to do it.

I remember a scene in college when I asked a friend the date or something and she said, "why don't you check your planner?" and I said "I don't have a planner" and she was all, "what?! I have three! How can you live without a planner?!" Um, I dunno.

I've had planners before, with real intentions of being all organized and what-not. I'd write some things in it, and then never look back at it again. I have a calendar in my office, but pretty much all that gets recorded on it is travel plans, especially Advisor's trips. I seem to have a pretty good sense of time, which I keep in my head in a sort of spatially structured way. Or something. In general, I seem to know when events or deadlines are approaching and how they relate to other events and deadlines. Maybe I'm just not busy enough yet, but I kind of don't think so because other people who are not any busier than me seem totally dependent on some kind of calendar system. However, I think I might come to need one eventually as I get more responsibility. I admit that I've needed to refer to a calendar more often in the last year or two, but that's to anchor my sense of time rather than to record events for later reference.

Interestingly, although I always knew when my homework was due and I rarely miss other deadlines, I'm abysmal at getting birthday cards in the mail in time. Sending cards to each of my 28 family members was my New Year's Resolution this year, and although I sent cards for all but two birthdays (and there are two still to come), I was late on almost all of them.

Final hours

Thanks for all the encouragement, Readers!

I got home around midnight last night. The chapter are all done, but I need to read through to make sure some changes I made last yesterday make sense. TOC is done, but there might be some weird stuff with the page numbers. Lists of Tables,Figures, and Abbreviations are not done, but I doubt my committee will care at this point.

So, today. I printed one copy of the fucker last night, and now I am going to read through it to make sure everything is OK. Then I'll take a stab at the LoT, LoF, LoA, and try to fix the page numbering issue. If any of those things get too hard, I will quit. Then I will take it to kinko's, get it printed and bound, buy some cds* to make electronic copies for everybody, and turn it in.

We're going out tonight. :)

*I thought it would be really nice to give each committee member a usb stick with the diss saved as both a word doc (so they can track changes) and a pdf. The pdf wont' happen because I can't do that on my laptop and I"m not making the drive back to the lab today. I bought enough usbs, but it cost $75, so I think I might take them back and use cds instead.

Down to the wire

So close, so close, so close, so close, so close, so close...

Booked!

BFF and I are actually going on a cruise! It'll be just the two of us, which is just as well because both of our boyfriends like to be up doing stuff, whereas BFF and I can literally sit on the beach for hours reading books side-by-side without speaking. Then get hosed and go out dancing. Also, we'll both have finished grad school just before the trip, whereas EGM will still be all stressy about finishing his diss and not enjoy the trip so much, thereby harshing my mellow, man.

I have never, ever been so excited about a trip, apart from the big trip to Far Off Land we took a few years ago. And I've never felt like I earned a vacation like I do now. I've been daydreaming about how relaxing and fun it's going to be. And I'm totally going to get a massage.

I'm sure I'll feel ill at the energy use and consumerism of this cruise, and I know that most people in the world work much harder than me and never get a break, so I'm very grateful to be able to go on such a vacation.

What's left

Taking a cue from Ambivalent Academic, I will list the remaining work I have to do on my thesis.

• Summary: not started
• TOC: fiddled with Word auto formatting to see if it would work; real version will be last step.
• Chapter 1/Introduction: "finished". Waiting for comments Academic Adviser promised would come today. Will tweak hypotheses (edited from my prelim proposal) as I do the final polishing.
• Chapter 2: "finished". Needs a read-through.
• Chapter 3: Finished and published.
• Chapter 4: "finished". Waiting for comments from Research Adviser that should come by Wednesday.
• Chapter 5: "finished". Waiting for comments Academic Adviser promised would come today.
• Chapter 6/Conclusions: Crappy draft written. Needs editing for style, and review of content to ensure it matches chapters.
  

Also:

• Embed tables and figures into text.
• Place chapters into one big document.
• Consecutively number tables and figures.
  
• Merge literature cited lists for each chapter into one big list; format.
• Format section headings to generate TOC.
• List of figures.
• List of tables.
  
• Vita

Three days to go!

Sweet and sour

My mom sent a card wishing me luck finishing up. In it was a check and instructions to get take-out some night that I work late and don't want to cook. Isn't that sweet?

The power is out in my building today, so I have to work at home. That's a bummer, because working at home never goes as well as working at work. However, RA is expecting an updated draft of one of the chapters tonight or tomorrow morning, so there is some accountability today.

I can't find my passport! It's expired anyway, but it looks like it's easier/faster/cheaper to renew than to get a totally new one. I can't believe it's missing because it has a spot. It's always in that spot. Except now. So I'm going to go tear apart the office in hopes of finding it. And I'm blogging about it because that always seems to help, right? Oh, and the reason I need to deal with this now is that BFF and I decided to take a cruise in January!!!! I'll be cutting it close on the passport, although if I pony up for expedited service I should be okay.

Edited to add: FOUND IT!!!! It was in EGM's passport spot, where I had already looked several times. It was just under something else. Woo-hoo!

They came through

All five chapters have now be read at least once by at least one of my advisors.

I planned to distribute the complete document next week. Research Advisor suggests I ask the other committee members if they plan to read it that far in advance in hopes of getting a little more time to polish. That would be great. Even if I get the extra time, I'm glad I planned to finish it this soon so I can maybe have time to "polish" rather than "frantically finish".

Reminding the Passengers that I'm not a special snowflake

The last two days didn't go so well. I got stuff done, but not as much as I wanted. My normal emotional stability vanished, and I was a bit of a mess. The passengers on my bus were screaming at me, and it really distracted me from my work. They were saying things like your dissertation is going to be a mess; your defense is going to be awful because Difficult Committee Member isn't going to understand this train wreck of a dissertation; you'll be wasting Out-of-State Committee Member's time with your shitty diss.; and so on.

But then today I was venting to Awesome Technician, as usual, and she reminded me that I'm not the first person to feel this way, which of course I know, and that I'm not the first person to have a diss. that's not perfectly polished, which I also know. But somehow her reminder kicked me out of my self-pitying state so I could work again. There's a reason I call her Awesome.

Another helpful thing happened today as well. Academic Advisor had indicated he wanted to review the main introduction to my diss., so I sent him a rough draft of it on Saturday. I ran into him yesterday morning when he was on his way out the door. He he said he had been reading it, had found some issues, and would finish with it and send me comments in the afternoon. Then I never heard anything else. So late this morning I sent him an email saying, basically, that it was shitty to tell me he had problems with my intro but to not tell me what they were. I got comments within an hour. They were super helpful, and really pushed me through the remaining work on that part.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I now have a finished introduction.

Postcard from dissertation jail

Is it unreasonable to expect that each of my chapters will get read by at least one of my advisors before I give the complete dissertation to the rest of the committee?

Also, today I wanted to stab my eyes out with my pen.

On the bright side, my wonderful EGM made chickpea curry for dinner. Can't wait!

Final lap

Okay, I'm starting to spaz. I have a week, maybe a week and a half to finish my diss. I have a lot left to do. That means I'm in dissertation jail this week. Here's the status.

• Introduction: written, in the last 2.5 days. Still pretty rough, but I think everything's in there. Except most of the references. Emailed to Advisors today, because one of them expressed interest in providing guidance/feedback. Any bets on if it will actually get read before I have to distribute the diss to my committee?
  
• Chapter 1: written, needs revision. This is the Poopsicle, which was meant to be Chapter 2 but we decided to put it the first position to deal with the data issues (the conclusion will be: this method sucks, other methods are way better, I used the better methods in the rest of the chapters - see?). Thus, I had to revamp the intro to the chapter, which I did today. I also redid some of the stats, and I still have to incorporate those results in the results and discussion sections. Plus fill in some more references and some general editing for style.
• Chapter 2: totally done. This is the one that is already accepted for publication, so it won't change other than formatting.
  
• Chapter 3: written. First draft went to Advisors in July. One never read it. One gave me really general comments in September. I revised it and sent it back. No reply. I do, however, have comments from a friend to help me polish it.
• Chapter 4: written. Emailed to Advisors on Saturday afternoon. Hopefully at least one of them will at least skim it before I have to distribute the diss. Still need to fill in a few last references.
  
• Conclusions: not started. But this part will be short.
• Formatting: not done. Started last night, then Word crashed and took my formatted chapter with it. Gah! I will have lots of time after my defense to get it just right for the Graduate College, so for now it just has to be formatted well enough for my committee to navigate it.
  
• Abstract, acknowledgments, table of contents, references: not done. Although each chapter has it's own reference list that I will have to fold into one. Did I mention that I'm a jackass who doesn't use reference managing software? I will be doing this manually.
  

On top of that, there is some distracting post-doc drama going on, and I got the proofs for the in-press paper. It's going to be an intense week. I best stop blogging!

Something is better than nothing

Yesterday I stayed home and failed to work, so today I went to my office. I was there for about 6 hours, and I got maybe 2 hours of real work done. It's tempting to feel really shitty about that, but I'm trying to have the mindset that something is better than nothing.

I remember the Dissertation Coach commenting that she has clients who avoid work all week, and then finally get motivated by her impending phone call (she has weekly phone meetings with her clients, who report their progress and then work with her to make a new plan for the next week). So they work for only a few hours in total all week, but still they get more done than they otherwise would without the accountability of the scheduled phone calls. Today when I sensed I was straying too much, I called EGM and we agreed to write for 30 minutes and then call back. It worked. Then we did it again. I still ended up reading a bunch of crap on wikipedia, but at the end of the day I had the introduction to my last chapter fleshed out, made the realization that I needed to report some addition results, calculated said results, and made a table to display them. So I could have done a lot more, but it was better than nothing.