I am probably too much of a perfectionist to write blog posts. I have already found myself sitting here for the past five minutes, trying to come up with the perfect introduction for the perfect first blog post, but I am assuming that I am missing the point of this whole exercise by pursuing this strategy. This is usually my downfall. I try to surpass expectations, but this means I waste much of my time thinking and not doing. It is difficult to know what to do when I have contradictory idioms floating around in my head:
"The only good dissertation is a done dissertation."
"It's not about getting done fast. It's about getting done right."
If you are dissertating, you have probably heard the first quote at some point. Simply put, it means don't spend more time on the dissertation than you need to because ultimately, most people are going to read your published articles, not your dissertation. Graduate. Get out. Get a job. Period.
The second quote comes from my advisor, who is of the tradition of taking a decade to graduate with a PhD and has certainly had his own students follow in his footsteps. I do not want to be one of these students, though I understand the need to feel proud of one's work, especially when one's work, at least in my case, involves over a quarter of one's life.
I was lucky enough to save myself yet another year of schooling by graduating with my Associate's and Bachelor's degrees in three years rather than the typical four, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to keep up that accelerated pace through graduate school, mainly because I'm a perfectionist yet again and wanted to find a project that greatly interests me and would set me apart from everyone else. Being a pioneer, or whatever you would like to call it, means you are going to run into hurdles. Some hurdles were easy to jump over. Other hurdles were ten feet high, and I had to climb and scratch my way to the top before I could get over because I refused to turn around and find a different track with smaller hurdles. As a result, I have six years under my belt already, even though when I first arrived in Iowa City, I boldly told everyone I would be out in five (That's what every new grad student says, though, right?), and I am determined this next year will be my last.
I have been quite fortunate this year. Out of the seven external grants/fellowships I applied for, I received four of them. Most of these support my research, but I recently found out I will be an American Association of University Women American Fellow this next year, which means that the AAUW is paying for my living expenses while I write because they are "confident that [I] can achieve [my] professional goals and [they] are pleased to provide this support." Hooray, right? Absolutely! But, along with this confidence in my abilities also comes a tremendous amount of pressure to not only get the dissertation done fast, but to also get it done right. All that money goes bye-bye if I don't satisfactorily finish by Summer 2016.
So, this year I have some fairly lofty goals. I plan to finish collecting and analyzing my data this summer, finish my dissertation by March, write four or more articles for publication, and perhaps most importantly, GET A JOB. And all this must be done fast and right.
I am assuming I have probably missed the point of this introductory blog post. I'm sure I was supposed to do the obligatory, "Hi, my name is Shelby. My dissertation research is an interdisciplinary approach to studying the evolution of language and cognition by measuring the brain activation patterns of novice toolmakers as they learn to replicate the process of Early Stone Age techniques with verbal or nonverbal instruction. Blah blah blah." That probably would have been the faster route to take. Yet again, my need to surpass expectations has gotten the better of me.
