Sunday, April 19, 2009

Unacceptable proposals

I came back from AERA with a cold so I decided not to go backpacking with my friends but to instead stay home and work on ASHE proposals, which are due May 1. The first proposal I was very excited about and had already gotten a start on. Then as I went to work, I realized two things. One, it would take about 90 more hours to finish. Two, my failure to anticipate one minor detail meant my findings would be pretty uninteresting. If I had 90 hours to spend over the next two weeks, it wouldn't be on that. So it was on to proposal two. Data collection issues, foreseeable but even more serious than I anticipated, derailed it.

I feel like I'm a first-year graduate student again, back in the days when Dr. Goldring would box my ears for my research proposals (deservedly and metaphorically). I could have gotten a chunk of my dissertation ready by this point, but I was holding back for reasons that seemed valid but now seem like excuses.

Well, I know who to blame, and mostly, it's me.

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