Goal for Today

My goal for today is to get chapters 1 & 2 to a point where I am comfortable sending them to my adviser...and then to actually send them to my adviser. This is a big step, and I'm slightly nervous. I do agree with the advice of Deirdre and others in this dissertation camp, though, that it is better to get feedback as early as possible. If I spend much more time on these chapters, then it will become more difficult to make any major revisions that might be needed.

Making Progress

Chapter 4 is coming together! Up until this week I've been avoiding dealing with it, since I find the statistics to be a bit overwhelming. The more I work on it, though, the more everything starts to make sense. My goal for today is to continue working on my Data Analysis section, and to keep working through the stack of articles that explain the theory behind the analyses I hope to use.

Week 2

Hi new blogging group! I hope you all had a great weekend.

This camp has been a great way to force myself to set aside time to work on my dissertation. I am moving into a new house, so there it's easy to get distracted by the packing, cleaning, and organizing. But setting aside the morning for writing and the afternoon for moving has been really helpful. After this week is over, I'm going to try to stick to the same schedule.

Last week, I made progress on my first 3 chapters, and found a ton of new sources to incorporate into my literature review. 

Week 2 Goal: This week, my goal is to work on organizing and polishing chapter 4, which is my materials and methods chapter. Right now, it is a mess of copied and pasted citations and poorly explained statistics. I hope that by the end of this week, it will at least be readable. 

Today's Goal: I want to work on the statistical analyses portion of chapter 4, incorporating information from multiple sources into my own words. I hope that doing this will help me better understand the statistics of my project, which is my major weakness at this point. 

We can do this

Yesterday was good. Today will be better.

Sisyphus and the Hill

Pushing a rock uphill, only to have it tumble back down. That's a pretty accurate analogy of how yesterday felt. It seemed like I was getting a lot done, but every time I thought my chapter was almost where it needed to be, I would find a new source that I needed to incorporate...and that source would lead to another source...and on, and on. It was a productive day in that I found some important information, which will ultimately strengthen my chapter, but it didn't seem like my writing was moving forward.

Here are today's goals:

1. Finish reading through the articles I found yesterday, and make notes of the important points that need to be included in my dissertation.
2. Re-work the tables in Chapter 1 to make sure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

Goals: Day 2

Well, I'm starting to come down with some kind of illness, so my goals for today are going to be less ambitious than previously planned. I would like to finish my final edits on chapter 1, which basically consists of re-reading an article, finishing a half-written paragraph, and polishing a section on the goals of my study. I would also like to read over my second chapter to make sure that it flows in a coherent way. Either today or tomorrow, I hope to go over Chapter 2 with one of the Writing Center tutors.

Dissertation Camp - Day 1

Today was pretty productive. I read through a complicated statistical article and figured out how to incorporate some of the methods into my research. Although my Methods & Materials chapter is still a mess, I have been slowly figuring out ways to better organize and explain my analyses. I also got some very helpful feedback on my Introduction chapter, which has helped me strengthen the structure of my intro. I tend to get caught up in the details, and need to remember to emphasize the significance and broader applications of my study.

2015 Dissertation Camp Intro

My name is Miranda, and I am a graduate student in biological anthropology. My research focuses on growth patterns of the occipital bone (located at the back of the skull) in modern humans and Neandertals. Most Neandertal occipitals have a distinctive protruding shape, commonly referred to as the "occipital bun." Interestingly, some modern humans also show similar morphology. Though this feature has been described and documented in the anthropological literature for over a century, little is known about its developmental and functional significance. My study aims to identify patterns of growth and development of this feature in modern humans. By better understanding the timing of occipital bun development in relation to the rest of the skull, I hope to determine why occipital buns develop, and whether modern humans obtained the feature by interbreeding with Neandertals.