Weddingbee boards

Okay, post-college but I think this is the right board? I am in the middle of dissertation hell right now and would love to chat with fellow dissertating bees. Aiming to get the full draft done by the end of the month and need to stay motivated! Anyone else?

ETA: I know in England, third year papers are "dissertations" but what I mean is actually Ph.D. dissertations... :-)

I work full time, am moving in with BF and am dissertating. FML. But no, its not too bad, I just need to stop procrastinating :-).

Hey! Like @OoOTifsterOoO: , I finished recently (in December). I just started a post-doc doing something pretty different (same discipline, different technique) and I get the feeling it's gonna be like grad school all over again. Fortunately, I had a great grad school experience! I just wanted to chime in and say 'hang in there!'  The occasional distraction keeps us sane, and we need to be sane in order to be productive, right? 

I'm trying to finish start my PhD proposal. I want to defend it in the next two months because I'm supposed to be out in the field again this summer so I can actually start analysis and writing this coming fall. Lazy wedding planning is way more entertaining...

@brenda.m.fields:  Because I work full time I barely get a couple hours in the evening, but I try to work a good 8 hours per day on the weekends to try to crank it out. Luckily for my discipline the dissertation is much more like a manuscript than the crazy 200 page paper so its more managable...

I'd say most days I wrote/edited for ~2 solid hours. I had one week where I wrote for ~6 hours/day  (not straight, cummulative) and banged out 2.5 chapters in 7 days (I had 5 chapters+references). I had a fair amount of stuff written already (~80 pages), so some days I spent 2-3 hours formatting text, figures and legends. Once I started writing it took me a little over 2 months to finish the whole thing (250+ pages), and I was still doing experiments 'til the very end, so I often couldn't devote more than 3 hours at a time. I know every discipline is different, but I hope that gives you an idea.

 I wanted to make sure I knew how things were going to flow before I started writing. Coming up with outlines for each chapter was time-consuming, but once these were done, the writing came naturally. Remember- No one knows your dissertation work better than yourself. Probably not even your adviser! 

Yes.  I hate it.  I do like teaching, though.  Maybe I'll find some way to turn that into gainful employment.  My field is super competitive right now, though.  Ugh.

This topic makes me so happy too! I am not yet at the dissertation stage (will be next year) but just finished my first qualifying exam and am beginning the prep for my second exam in the Doctor of Public Health program (concentrating in Epidemiology) at CUNY. I have 4 more classes in the didactic portion of my degree. My dissertation should take me a year because "we have our whole careers to do something innovative in the way of primary data collection", so they want us to focus on using existing data but complex methodology to analyze it. I have never felt my brain turn to mush like I did after finishing my first qualifying exam a couple weeks ago - but I was a good girl and only went on wedding bee twice during the 2 weeks I had to complete the exam :) (It was a 2 week take home exam that covered 3 separate content areas, since my degree is a professional (Dr.P.H.) degree and not a pure Ph.D..