The dissertation was largely undone when we returned to the States in October of 2015. I had dabbled with it during the time in Adelaide and even made some progress on understanding my design (statistics are indeed the bane of my existence). For that I must thank Alexander Stretton at the University of South Australia (thanks. Alex!). I certainly did a lot of reading too – something like 1200 articles and studies were consumed, and I had written perhaps 6 drafts of chapters one and two. But it never got a head of steam.
Part of the reason was Adelaide itself. The weather is to-die-for and this invited me outside nearly everyday. Or, when it was HOT, like 114 degrees-really-hot, I certainly did not feel like writing. Plus, it never really ever got that cold (never froze, not once). Our Internet connection in Tranmere was the fastest we could find but it hiccuped far too often. And it didn’t help when I shattered my arm in February of 2014. Then too was the work I was doing as an executive coach, through TEC and on my own. In other words, there were plenty of distractions.
The fact was, I tried and failed, and tried and failed. I certainly never lost my enthusiasm, but let’s face it, the damn thing never got off the ground.
So what changed? Cindy and I were reflecting on this yesterday during a walk through the hills surrounding Laramie. We came up with this list:
- Moving back to the States. Something about being here, with snappy and relatively constant Internet, helped get the fires stoked.
- The return also put me within close proximity to my committee and especially my chair, Tom Harrison. No more negotiating an 18 hours time differences across an International Dateline. No more spotty Skype connections. I was able to quickly bop over to Reno on Southwest Airlines for regular meetings with Tom and to then come away super-charged each time. Nothing like that when
you are literally 10,000 miles away. - It is the Year of the Monkey. I barely know what that means, but an Asian friend of ours pointed out that since I was born in the Year of the Monkey, its re-occurrence this year was sure to mean great things for me. Funny how little superstitious things like that can motivate us.
- A new roll-top desk. It is big and wide and full of nook and crannies. It is heavy and robust. It is everything a writer needs.
- A new Lenovo desktop computer, with a touch screen running Windows 10. It is beautiful and super-fast. That helped a lot.
- A simple study design. Yes, the simplicity helped a lot. When I first started on the doctoral journey, the design was rather convoluted and would have probably meant endless road-blocks, rat holes, and fights with the Institutional Review Board. When Tom Harrison, and then Cleb Maddux, agreed that the simpler design would work and would result in a solid piece of work, I was thrilled.
- Zotero. What is Zotero, you ask? Simple: It’s an ass-saving solution (ASS). Academic writers must assemble oodles of citations from piles of studies and articles, which are then used in building the dissertation “case.” Keeping track of all those articles and studies was becoming a nightmare. I literally had something like 1,700 individual articles to store and then I had to remember where in the piles a particular citation was. During a meeting with my subject-matter-librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno, a woman to whom I am eternally grateful for what she did for me, she recommended a piece of “free-ware” called Zotero. It is, put simply, a reference manager. I had tried EndNote and Mendeley (both of which cost money), but was not happy and had given up with them years ago. Zotero on the other hand worked the first time and every time. Thank you, Ann Medaille!
The weather in Laramie. Snow and rain. A writer’s dream. I can think of nothing better than to begin one’s day with a cup of coffee, with a little bourbon as sweetener, then commencing to write when the weather outside is dreadful.- A tidy little home with absolutely all inside and outside maintenance taken care of by a hired team. It meant no distractions whatsoever for me, who can be distracted by the next shiny thing all day long.
- The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that I’d bought. I no longer use it, so please take this with a grain of salt, but at first it really helped to keep the train on the tracks. Fast and sexy, it was a joy to use. Battery life, on the other hand, was dismal and it soon fell out of use. But not before it helped me to get my chapters written.
- A fantastic mentor text. She doesn’t know it, but its author Sabina R. Glab truly saved my butt. Her work was terrific and closely mirrored mine. It was a joy to open her text every day and compare what I’d done to what she’d done and to know that I was headed in the right direction.
Statistics Package for the Social Sciences!
- Running my own data. One can certainly learn statistics from a book but comprehension (for me) really took off when I started to play with my own data. There is something about tweaking an analysis this way or that, to see how things change, that really makes it fun. Geeky I know, but SPSS makes infinitely more sense when it’s your own data you’re working on.
- Near-complete focus. I really had nothing else to do but get up and try to write everyday. No yard work, no home maintenance work, nothing but time to write. And when it is blowing snow and pounding rain outside, there is something truly warm and magical about sitting a roll-top desk and writing your heart out.
- Quick IRB Approval. This came about half-way through the completion phase of the dissertation, but it worked wonders on my psyche. I had feared NOT getting approval, for some reason, and was sweating it out. When the approval came in only three days (!), I sighed a sigh of intense relief. And the fires burned even hotter.
So those are the things (the differences, if you will) that truly made a difference and which propelled me to get the damn thing done. I also dropped all pretense of achieving a perfect thesis, remembering that the very best dissertation is the done dissertation.
