On April 27, I made a fateful decision. We were in San Antonio for NIOSA, and I was holed up in our hotel room trying to do the impossible — crank out a full research paper in a single day. HA!
I have done stranger things, but the key stumbling block this go around was that I realized on my plane ride down to San Antonio the night before that my data set actually didn’t have included/coded the KEY VARIABLE I needed to run the data analysis. While this may sound like gobble-de-gook for most of you, this was essentially a nail on the coffin of turning the paper in on time.
SO. I did the unthinkable (for me) and requested an incomplete — giving me until mid-October to finish the paper and collect my grade in the course.
The professor in question is one who has taken a real shine to me (it helps that I’ve had her for two classes, and am taking a third from her this fall, and study things that are very similar to her own research), so she was all too happy to comply with my request.
Ever since then, she’s been popping her head into my office at UTD asking, “Got a paper for me?”
UGH.
Procrastination is a truly hideous force in my life, and this is just a silly little 20-25 page research paper. No big whoop.
Still, I have big aspirations for this project — in the months since that fateful day, I’ve submitted this paper for consideration at two academic conferences next spring!! — so I want it to be strong.
The thing is, the key variable I need to make this all work doesn’t actually exist in the literature on the topic (which I’ll spare you the details of). Others have attempted to study this, but none have actually factored it into a statistical analysis the way I’d like to.
So while it appears as though I’ve done precious little work on this project since April, I’ve in fact been keeping the interlibrary loan department at UTD’s library very busy, requesting very esoteric books on the topic from other university libraries and trying to create some sense out of what only nominally exists.
And I’ve done it. I have holed myself up at the UTD library, where I type this now, with the express promise to myself that I will not get up from my perch until I have made significant progress on the paper. I’m writing now — taking a break, I mean — because I just finished about 2 hours of work on the data analysis, and it’s done.
DONE.
I have statistically significant results and in the expected directions for most of my variables, and it’s time to pull the table and go start … well, finish — writing, as much of the introductory material and theoretical setup has long since been written.
This is a huge personal victory, and I couldn’t possibly be prouder of myself. I might make it as an academic after all!!