Our first big deadline!

It’s now "crunch time" as we near our first big deadline for our dissertation projects — Friday, 16 March 2007. T-minus 7 days!

We had hoped to be further along than we are but we think we’re still within range of meeting this deadline. 3/16 isn’t actually a hard and fast deadline; it’s more of a guideline. But we’re hoping to get pretty close. Most of our spare time, including our day off on Monday, will be devoted to this task. This first deadline is very important. Getting behind at this stage will force us to play catch up, so we want to stay on track as much as we can.

For this first deadline, we are to submit a rough draft of chapters 1-3 of our dissertation projects. We both have written rough drafts of chapter 1 and are working on chapter 2, which is a pretty intense review of literature related to our topics. The plan, at the moment, is to be pretty well done by Saturday (3/17), and to mail them out on Monday (3/19), after our home visit with the social worker from our adoption agency.

After we submit this first assignment, we’ll continue researching current literature. Over the next few months, we’ll work on polishing the first three chapters, in preparation of a "proposal hearing" later this summer.

One of our next big steps will involve putting together a Research Reflection Team, a group of 4-8 people from our local churches who will meet with us nine times during the rest of the year, to help us process our research and offer feedback along the way. We expect these groups to get started shortly after Easter.

Well, we’ll post our next dissertation progress report after we complete this first leg of the journey! We will try to say more about our specific topics in that report as well.

2 thoughts on “Our first big deadline!”

  1. I appreciate your referring to this draft as “very” rough. That’s certainly what mine is. I got it mailed in on Friday. There is still a lot to do, especially on ch. 3. I decided just to send what I have and then keep reading and working on it until the edited version comes back–and then keep polishing. Sounds like you all are moving along well with it.

    Congratulations on the adoption process–I trust the home visit will go well.

    Reply
  2. Thanks, John. It’s good to hear from you. And congratulations on making the first deadline! 🙂

    Ours are coming along. We both expect to mail ours in within the next couple of days, even with the “interruption” tomorrow morning (i.e. adoption-related home visit). And like you, our Chapters 3s will probably be especially rough.

    We’ll say more once they’re in the mail!

    Reply

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