I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, although it is very dim, it is definitely visible. As of Thurday, I finished up all of my coursework for the Spring Semester. I now have five days until I begin my programs comprehensive final exams, YIKES! Then it's one last online class, 180 internship hours, and a dissertation left in my pursuit of a doctoral degree. 229 days until graduation, if everything goes as planned. Typically ,whenever I have set a goal, I have achieved it and I don't plan on that changing with this goal either.
I took Friday off and enjoyed the day. Got a workout in, enjoyed FAC at Old Lumber Company, had a wonderful dinner at Red Steakhouse, and saw a great USD performance of Pippin.
I plan to start my daily formal dissertation process on Monday, May 5th, even though this has been a subject I have been researching and a passion of mine for over two years. Saturday, I decided I wasn't going to waste five days of quality daylight doing nothing further on my dissertation project until the comprehensive final exams. I spent 8 hours at Panera Bread in Sioux City reading the book Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day by Dr. Joan Bolker, and from her suggestions decided to build a digital dissertation organizer using Google productivity suite.
Today, I put the finishing touches on the site which includes a calendar, work log, and this personal research journal. I also read the first two chapters of a dissertation on communities of practice, that has some applicability to my subject. I also used it to re-acclimate to the dissertation writing process.
This semester, I had a great qualitative methods course that allowed me as a final project to compose a high quality methodology process for my study. I am excited about how that project will have the potential to evolve into most of my Chapter 3. For the next few day,s until my comprehensive exams I plan to start finding more articles and developing an outline for Chapters 1 and 2. Then, May 5th, it is full steam ahead and a devotion of at least 2 hours everyday until I graduate.
Plan for Monday: Finish reading dissertation on communities of practice and search for articles on principal professional development.
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