an academic post!
Feb. 9th, 2019 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookhobbit I've spent the day working on homework, updating my degree plan, and contemplating my qualifying paper, so here's a post about things that are going on in my academic life. I'm afraid it may seem rather banal, but....
My supervisor FINALLY got second-draft comments back to me on my first QP. I'm going to make the edits tomorrow - they're all quite small from a quick look. For example, four entire comments are just "you used again as a discourse marker too much", one is "find more citations for this," another is "can you make these images smaller?" So that gives you an idea of the level of change that's going to be required - it's not huge structural stuff, just neatening up the edges. He said it was "coming along quite nicely" and I think from him I should understand this to be a very positive comment.
After this I have to run it by the other committee members. I don't know how many changes they're going to want - Dr Phonetics is really big on statistical rigor and also made a suggestion about a factor I didn't look for and am going to need to now, so she might ask for bigger ones. Dr Morphologist kind of implied that he wouldn't be expecting to make big changes. So I guess we'll see? And after that I need to defend it. It's only half an hour and I've already presented the data at a conference in a twenty-minute slot, so I can Probably just use the same presentation jazzed up and expanded. (None of the committee members saw the conference presentation, as they were at other sessions so it won't be repetitive or anything for them.)
So I'm hoping to defend before the end of the semester, and then spend this summer working on my second QP, like I did last summer. Then at the very latest I'm hoping to have my second QP done at the end of my third year (god I'm hoping it won't take the whole year this time because 80% of that time was several months waiting for Dr Supervisor to get back to me per draft), and then it'll be on to my prospectus.
As of the end of Maymester - in which I am taking a course on Tolkien's conlangs because COME ON, I GOTTA - I will also be done with mandatory degree plan coursework. Not done with classes - I'm almost certainly going to be taking some other stuff in the fall and maybe one or two things in the spring. Dr Supervisor is offering corpus linguistics which I ought to take given my interest in it, and he also thinks I should take a network analysis class to help with my thesis. Also, I'm thinking about completing the interdisciplinary teaching certificate which will essentially mean two more classes whenever I have room for them (probably this year). However, I can graduate no problem without having done any of this, so it's all technically extraneous to my actual degree.
This is really weird. Like, this technically is my last year of linguistic coursework. I thought it was going to take forever but it's gone by so fast.
Anyway, by the end of two years I'll have completed all my mandatory PhD coursework, and by the end of three years I should be done with all the optional stuff I want to do. So, between that and the QP2 plans, I'm shaping up to be ABD at the end of my third year, if I'm really lucky. This puts me more or less right on track with the Official Completion Timeline (tm) but in practice slightly ahead of most of the actual PhD students, so that's nice. It also potentially gives me that next summer to work on my prospectus.
Why am I in such a hurry? Answer: Keel. I want to live with Keel. I want to be in the same country as Keel. Also, you know, funding. Part of me wonders if I should slow it down and work hard on publication because that will make me a vastly more employable candidate if I want to stay in academia, But Like, will I need to slow down to do that? I can't work towards publication much at the moment bc I've got nothing publishable. So, we'll see I guess.
My supervisor FINALLY got second-draft comments back to me on my first QP. I'm going to make the edits tomorrow - they're all quite small from a quick look. For example, four entire comments are just "you used again as a discourse marker too much", one is "find more citations for this," another is "can you make these images smaller?" So that gives you an idea of the level of change that's going to be required - it's not huge structural stuff, just neatening up the edges. He said it was "coming along quite nicely" and I think from him I should understand this to be a very positive comment.
After this I have to run it by the other committee members. I don't know how many changes they're going to want - Dr Phonetics is really big on statistical rigor and also made a suggestion about a factor I didn't look for and am going to need to now, so she might ask for bigger ones. Dr Morphologist kind of implied that he wouldn't be expecting to make big changes. So I guess we'll see? And after that I need to defend it. It's only half an hour and I've already presented the data at a conference in a twenty-minute slot, so I can Probably just use the same presentation jazzed up and expanded. (None of the committee members saw the conference presentation, as they were at other sessions so it won't be repetitive or anything for them.)
So I'm hoping to defend before the end of the semester, and then spend this summer working on my second QP, like I did last summer. Then at the very latest I'm hoping to have my second QP done at the end of my third year (god I'm hoping it won't take the whole year this time because 80% of that time was several months waiting for Dr Supervisor to get back to me per draft), and then it'll be on to my prospectus.
As of the end of Maymester - in which I am taking a course on Tolkien's conlangs because COME ON, I GOTTA - I will also be done with mandatory degree plan coursework. Not done with classes - I'm almost certainly going to be taking some other stuff in the fall and maybe one or two things in the spring. Dr Supervisor is offering corpus linguistics which I ought to take given my interest in it, and he also thinks I should take a network analysis class to help with my thesis. Also, I'm thinking about completing the interdisciplinary teaching certificate which will essentially mean two more classes whenever I have room for them (probably this year). However, I can graduate no problem without having done any of this, so it's all technically extraneous to my actual degree.
This is really weird. Like, this technically is my last year of linguistic coursework. I thought it was going to take forever but it's gone by so fast.
Anyway, by the end of two years I'll have completed all my mandatory PhD coursework, and by the end of three years I should be done with all the optional stuff I want to do. So, between that and the QP2 plans, I'm shaping up to be ABD at the end of my third year, if I'm really lucky. This puts me more or less right on track with the Official Completion Timeline (tm) but in practice slightly ahead of most of the actual PhD students, so that's nice. It also potentially gives me that next summer to work on my prospectus.
Why am I in such a hurry? Answer: Keel. I want to live with Keel. I want to be in the same country as Keel. Also, you know, funding. Part of me wonders if I should slow it down and work hard on publication because that will make me a vastly more employable candidate if I want to stay in academia, But Like, will I need to slow down to do that? I can't work towards publication much at the moment bc I've got nothing publishable. So, we'll see I guess.
