Monday, January 10, 2011

Course work completed

I can hardly believe that all my courses in the doctorate are now complete. I finished my last course in December (qualitative research) and have taken the past couple of weeks off to mentally rest. I now have to work on my proposal and get it into viable shape for a defense.

The course portion of the program was the 'easy' part because there were firm deadlines to follow and a group of peers to keep you motivated. Now I have to motivate myself a lot more. I am trying to set a series of self-imposed deadlines so that I know I am continuing to make progress. Having said that, I was getting impatient towards the end of the last course in the fall because over the years I have done lots of course work and research but not participated in an actual reserach project from start to finish. That is the exciting thing about this new stage of the program.

In the fall I started a new job and that partially explains the lack of regular contact with the blog as a means to capture my thougths. The new position is one that I am really enjoying and it does tie into my research interests BUT it is hard to separate the time from one task to the next. I find I have become a bit lazy and want to have my evenings to myself - not to be working on the doctorate. I imagine that is the problem that all of us doing a fulltime program and working fulltime face.

As an aside, I am going to miss all my peers in the program. Some of us will try to stay in touch but it is inevitable that without the regular contact through courses and face to face interactions many of us will loose touch. I guess that is another sad aspect of the end of courses. It would be good if there was a reason for all of us to get together in Calgary one more time but that is not reasonable with everyone's work taking such different turns.

Anyway, I have set a deadline of Jan 17 to send my supervisor an draft proposal that builds on the work from 700 and on the work from 701.01. We'll see at that point where I have to round out the work.

Gerona

No comments:

Post a Comment