Submitted!

I ran around like a crazy person today trying to get my dissertation submitted. First I had to make some last-minute updates to the Table of Contents (utilizing the This Page Left Unintentionally Blank technique for a figure I removed so I wouldn't have to get copyright permission for it). Then I had to find acid-free paper. The campus bookstore had two sad little 100-page packs (good for one manuscript, but I needed two on acid-free), but they kindly directed me to printing services on the outskirts of campus. Paper secured I printed one copy and took it to the library, where it was deemed okay by the very nice woman in the binding office.

I came home to print the other three copies, with time running short on the 4pm deadline to get it in to the registrar. So, of course, right at the beginning of the last on the toner started going on the printer. I zoomed to Staples and back, printed the last copy, and jetted over to school, raging at traffic. But I got to the office at a quarter to four... and they asked if I could come back Monday, because the grad records person wasn't in. Which I knew, but I figured I could still drop it off. The other woman at the desk said, oh, write the check and we'll just put it on her desk and she'll send you a receipt later. Yay!

I went to the department to turn in a bunch of receipts and stuff. It was sort of sad because I won't be seeing people as often.

Then I got ice cream! Good thing they got an ice cream cart at school after I leave! I don't need it!

Dr. C in da hizzle

Yeah, I passed. Defense went great; no committee members succumbed to stuffy hot sleepiness.

PhD!!!

25 minutes

Okay, we're going for 25, and I feel fine with that. The confirmatory factor analysis results were a mess to try to present anyway, and I cut my interactions in half to the really interesting ones, so I probably have a better talk at the end of the day than when I thought I had 40 minutes.

The confusion is not mine

My advisor was laboring under this notion that my thesis defense was not open to the public in any way (so a shorter talk would make sense, because why talk for 40 minutes to people who have read your dissertation). I feel like the department academic advisor: "Doesn't anyone read the handbook!" It's on the school calendar. I told everyone to come if they hadn't heard me blather already.

So maybe I'm talking for 40 minutes, maybe for 25, maybe for 10 if no outside people show up. Who knows! It's a mystery.

Don't bother to be prepared, kids, cuz you're just going to have to wing it anyway.

(Lest anyone think otherwise, my advisor is great... I'm just not very thrilled with this misunderstanding).

Defense tomorrow

So, I was all prepared for my defense and utterly unnervous about it as a result (esp given the context of having presented most of the material already to questioning audiences and of planning 22 lectures for my class). Then my advisor told me Friday that I should really cut my talk to 25 minutes from the 40 the committee chair had suggested when I emailed about it 10 days ago (for the purposes of, you know, having my act together), and then lectured me about not coming off as too casual. You know, casual like a three day lead time on advice about important parameters for my important talk when I emailed about it 10 days ago.

Goodbye grad school. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of my life.

Friday, oh Friday

If you're reviewing a paper, before letting forth a spew of verbal diarrhea about all the things that you find confusing or weird about the paper, maybe you should try looking back at the paper to see if what you're confused about is actually explained. Thanks. People will have a lot more respect for your comments.

Of course, I'd also have a lot more respect for the positive reviews if they bothered to make comments instead of just scores.

My NCA paper landed in kind of a random panel that I'm sure will be perfectly lovely, but I think I'm going to let my advisor cover it, since he has other stuff going on for that conference and I'm keen on only one visit to San Diego this fall (if I'm going to bother going west, I have other places I want to and ought to go).

I've been working on both my thesis defense presentation and my class this week. The presentation is supposed to be 40 minutes, which is as long as I had for my job talk, but now I have so many other things to talk about also. I'm not really sure how it's all going to fit. In terms of class stuff, I've been perusing prior years and other syllabi from up the road and realizing that I have a pretty clear notion of the range of things that should be taught in an intro to SBS class. Of course there are more things that I can really fit, so I have to weed out some stuff. But it's nice to feel authoritative enough to have an independent opinion and to be able to critique and change how it's been done before instead of just having to copy it because I don't know what else to do.

Conferencing

I'm back from Montreal. ICA was really great, and it's nice to go to a conference where theory is valued. Not that I ended up going to as many sessions as I wanted... there is always something shiny to do, like sleep or venture to Chinatown for lunch. It's also hard when you're presenting every day to get to much more than your own stuff, but that's why papers are posted online!

The first presentation, a grad student panel on the crazy world of international research, was really fun even if it wasn't well-attended. Mostly the Hopkins folk really like it and want us to do the panel at school, which I think would be great (I think stuff like that would always be great for department seminar, but no one has ever listened to me when I say that outside speakers are fab, but we also have cool people here).

The second session, with ye ol' Honduras theater paper that still isn't in a journal, also went well. I got a few questions, which was cool. It was first thing in the morning, though, so also not super heavily attended.

Top paper panel? Lots of people, because it's right before the health comm business meeting and reception. I was having a bad personal day, and the crowd was huge, so I felt like I nervously rushed through the talk, but it seemed to gather the second most number of questions after (mostly stuff that I'll be answering at NCA with my dissertation work). It wasn't my best talk, though.

In other news, please don't ride Amtrak's Adirondack to Montreal. It may be cheap, but unless you're traveling alone it's probably still the same price/cheaper to drive. It took us 12 hours each way to and from New York Penn Station. Horrible. On the way up we were stuck behind a group of 20 high school girls who never shut up. On the way back the bathroom smelled. The guy in the cafe car was awesome, though, and I did get a lot of magazines read.

As for future conferences, I got emails last night from APHA that one of my abstracts (main dissertation results) got a roundtable and the other (stigma measurement stuff) got a poster. I was sort of miffed at the lack of oral presentations, but then I got an email today that the roundtable abstract won best abstract on an international HIV/AIDS topic, so that's cool. I have to see where the NCA paper lands before deciding whether I'm going to both conferences. I dunno what's up with San Diego this year, but these conferences are a month apart there.

So, I'm back at the office today, feeling kind of refreshed. Rather, I think I felt stressed about presenting before I left, so I feel comparably better today. I also got more sleep in the past week (although not last night, since boy is still in NJ). My house is disgusting, though. I need to start looking for a new place and packing. I also need to get on damn Blackboard already (well, I'm on, just not attached to my course) so I can plan my class. I also need to get my thesis defense presentation together. Fun.

Winner!

I won the department poster competition (in the doctoral category) today! I got a nice Hopkins photo frame and some notecards with the pretty hospital facade on them.

Still no word from NCA -- my advisor said not to worry since they had all kinds of problems sending out acceptance emails, but I still haven't heard and I thought they were going to work those out by today.

UPDATE: I just checked the website again, and they must still be having problems because they just posted a big ol' pdf of all the accepted papers. And mine is in!!!

Friday!

I'm not being very productive at the moment... I finished my IRB stuff (which I've done before over the years, but every school makes you do it again), and then I've been poking at ICA logisitics, answering emails, etc. I'm feeling bummed because I think my dissertation-based paper didn't get accepted to NCA -- I heard about a panel I'd forgotten I was sort of on (my advisor is the presenter) last night but haven't received any word on my own paper. Depressing. I thought it was much better than either paper I'm presenting at ICA -- the measures are better, it's a friggin experimental design for gods' sake! Maybe I'm just sourpussing too soon and I'll hear this weekend.

I'm also grumpy because neither my advisor nor my boyfriend are emailing me back today. It's cold and boring in here, and I need email to get through! I stayed up past my bedtime last night at TV Night, so I'm real tired.

The commute remains bad. Yesterday I tried alternate routes, which were new and fun, but no faster. Good options to break up boredom. Today I got here and the parking garage was full, so I had to go park by the Navy Lodge. I can't wait to move.

Ugh, editing

So, I got my dissertation back from my advisor on Monday, and I was pleased to see that there weren't really any major overhauls I needed to do. But that means that instead I just have a bunch of piddly shit to slog through. Of course there are a few areas where I actually had to dig up a few articles, which is such a pain because it's a ton of time for like one paragraph. I hoped to get this out Friday, but I still have a giant list of things to do.

Not to mention redoing a ton of graphs because my advisor and I have complete opposite ways of reading and interpreting graphs (there's this one graph in a paper we have coming out that I always have to redraw because it's completely backwards to me).

I start work tomorrow, which should mostly be a day of logistics, like I-9 forms and email setups and stuff. I'm pretty excited. I'm not that excited about commuting for about 6 weeks, but I'll probably try to swing it so I can come in later and leave later after the first few days.

Or

3) He got grant stuff dumped on him and just got to my diss yesterday.

Silence

Either 1) my advisor thinks my draft is really terrible and is avoiding telling me by waiting until I bother him or 2) it's just taking him a while to edit. I'm not going to ask him and ruin my vacation if it's the former.

Draft done!

I got the dissertation draft emailed to my advisor at 2, and now I'm getting ready to jet out of town!

Midnight oil

Had a snack, and I'm working on getting this discussion done... I feared that it would take a while. My advisor would prefer to have the dissertation by 2 tomorrow, but he may just have to wait a few hours...

Assistant Professor

So, it's official! I have a job! Coming May 12...

Alisha H. Creel, (almost PhD)
Assistant Professor
Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

Course: Social and Behavioral Aspects of Public Health (pre-fall, July 7-August 13).

Basically it's hard salary, federal benefits, one class, 3 years of startup research money plus a postdoc/RA, and really great colleagues.

Overall, the job search turned out great! I uncovered a real diamond with this job (had no idea how great the place was before I found out more about it during my phone screen). My luck never ceases to amaze me -- I end up in great places, far beyond my own work to get there.

In dissertation news, I promised the full draft to my advisor on Friday, and it looks pretty likely to happen. If I have time to get my tire fixed (idiotically popped it on a curb), we'll probably escape to NJ for some vacay. My excel spreadsheet is pointing to the second week in June as a strong possibility for a defense date, so let's hope that pans out.

Endless tables

Making tables is a fun break from actual writing. Until you get to the 5th iteration of the same tables.

Other than that, things are going great. Announcements soon, once things are finalized.

Plugging along

I actually bothered to go to the office today. I've added some more to the methods section and poked at the data slightly. It's not as fun as being at the shore, but I do have one of the better views around here at least.

My meeting was supposed to be in 15 minutes, but it got pushed back half an hour, so I guess I have to try to work some more. Even if I only work in ADD-esque spurts I still get a lot more done than if I don't poke at the document every few minutes.

Progress

I didn't get that much work done this week thanks to this stupid cold and the awful heat that made me lazy. But I did manage to make a list of all the changes and revisions to the household survey from beginning to end (organized into four rounds), type up all the notes my RAs took during group discussions, and hammer out a chunk of the methods section. I think I'm going to finish all I can do with that for now next week, and then I'll start working on some analysis. I think this dissertation won't irk me too much, which is more than I can say for my poor boyfriend, whose department seems hell bent on throwing stupid obstacles in his way.

Work starts tomorrow

Since I returned, I haven't been doing much work. Mostly I've been catching up on TV and hanging out with Joe. I did manage to visit my advisor at his new house to fill him in on the details of the actual study. He's going to try to put a panel together for ICA on how to do research in crazy settings, and I definitely have plenty to say on that!

I went in practically every day last week trying to get my expenses entered into HopkinsOne. It's the dumbest system on the planet. My travel request had been granted with my travel advnace on one trip number. Then, on a separate trip number, my flight had been reimbursed. This apparently allowed my flight to reimbursed in a timely fashion instead of when I returned from the trip. But it also had the effect of screwing things up with the travel advance, because we couldn't enter any receipts since it was like, you already got reimbursed for those dates. Basically, it allowed our office to enter in something that then totally screwed it up. It's all well and good for them to say, don't enter things that way, but it's preferable for the system to just not let you enter things that way if it's the wrong thing to do. Anyway, the higher ups had to tweak it so that we could enter receipts. We entered all the big ones, with minor hassles along the way trying to make the system not suck, and then shoved the rest into the giant per diem category. It all worked out.

So, tomorrow I start work on my dissertation and other projects. This includes a paper my advisor and I are writing using the old midterm data due July 30. And it also includes osme new potential papers for a Comm Theory call for papers on interpersonal communication and campaigns. Devepending on how much overlap there is between these manuscripts and my dissertation, I may switch to a 3-manuscript format, but I'm only inclined to do that if the pros really outweigh the cons because I can hammer out a traditional format very quickly.

Tomorrow I think I'll start putting some things into the methods section. Things like, "After the chief welcomed us to the village, someone gave a prayer."

I stil have no job, but I signed up for a bunch of federal loans in case the CDC thing doesn't happen!