Dissertation Mode: GO

I'm done teaching for the semester!  The only things I have left for the semester proper are two mountains of grading (the last assignment and the final for the class I was teaching).  My fellow teaching assistant and I did a final review session for our students this afternoon, so now it's time to switch gears entirely.  That is, I now intend to hang up my syntactician shoes for good and turn all of my academic energy toward writing a chapter or two of my dissertation over the next few months.

To that end, I have several thousand instances of /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds to analyze in the next two weeks, which means I will be sitting in front of my computer looking at displays like this for several hours a day:

Yes indeedy.  Baby babble all day long.

Also to that end, I attended a dissertation writing workshop the week before last, and they gave us a nice packet of tips and encouragement for writing a thesis.  I read through it over the weekend, and I found this gem of a quote:

"When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired.  If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough."

Huzzah!  Let the fun begin!

This Summer

I have plans for this summer.  Most of them include bearing down and figuring out how exactly to go about writing at least one chapter of my dissertation.  I've been plugging away at a really awesome study that I'm very proud and excited about, and that my advisors tell me should be at least one chapter of my dissertation.  I don't have any results yet - I'm still collecting and processing data - but I should have results within the next month, and then this summer I will be figuring out how to write them up.  I have no idea how to write a dissertation.  I suppose that's what advisors are for...

Anyway, here are my other plans:

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Road.  Trip.  Massive, massive road trip, in which I pass through four of the remaining states I've never been to (Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) and visit two national monuments (Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore), and pass through a couple of cities that are supposed to be surprisingly cool (Boise, Fargo, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago - although I've already been to the last two and know that I love them).  It is going to be epic, and I am really excited.

For now, though, I need to get back to work and read about how the vocal tract develops over the first few years of life.  Speech development is so cool, I'm telling you.  Anyway, I thought I'd been silent to the blogosphere for a while, so I figured it was time to send out a smoke signal.  I'm still here!  Just busy learning to program, reading papers, and teaching some undergrads.  Plugging away, as always...