Welcome to Candidacy

Sorry blog, it's been a while. It's not that I haven't had things to share, it's just that the end of the semester and trying to pull everything together combined with my low energy and wanting to just watch Netflix all day has been winning out over writing. I have a big accomplishment to share, however, and I really can't let this one slide from being a blog post.

Yesterday I successfully defended my dissertation proposal! I am now officially a PhD Candidate, no longer just a student. This means I've finished all of my coursework, and can now say I'm "ABD" which is "all but dissertation." So what is a proposal? A proposal for my program is the first three chapters of my dissertation. These chapters consist of the hardest chapter to write, the first chapter, a literature review, the second chapter, and a description of how I will perform my study, or the methods chapter, the third chapter. The first chapter is the most difficult because it is essentially describing what the dissertation will be, and what the problem is that I will be addressing. You might not believe how hard it is to write a problem statement, but it is. Very hard. If there is anything I've learned from being in grad school like this, it is how to write so precisely that no one has a question about what I'm writing. The funny thing about writing with clarity and precision is that it takes three times as many words that then get removed. It's quite amazing. I've gotten used to tossing pages of words out the window during my writing process, but writing this proposal has brought it to a whole new level. I've probably tossed about 5-6,000 words, maybe more. That's about 20 double-spaced pages. My entire proposal is almost 80 pages. Ah, the process of writing. Especially chapter 1.

And this morning when I woke up I felt this great accomplishment. The sky was blue, and little Baby B was moving around like she was really excited too. There are some minor revisions I have to make with my proposal, but my entire committee signed off on it and now I can look ahead to a phase of my study where I am entirely focused on dissertation writing. I am sure that somewhere in my dissertation acknowledgements I will write that I defended my proposal at 36 weeks pregnant.