As I am nearing the end of course work during my doctoral journey, I want to stop and talk about continued learning and even as adults and administrators each one of us finds an additional passion that sparks inquiry and the desire to grow. I am planning on defending my qualifying paper in the near future and with that comes a lot of writing. I have to say that I have even shocked myself in my writing skills. As a high school student, I didn't write well. One of my high school teachers told me at one point that I would never be successful in a college English course. I do have to say that I proved her wrong ... but funny to think about all the amazing interactions I am sure that I had with teachers in high school, that is the one and only comment I remember. As educators, we must consider the impact we could have on a child and we must use that for positive influence.
I want to talk a little about the dissertation topic process. We worked though a lot of topics regarding our dissertation writing process that will help as we embark on developing what we are going to submit. I am currently working on my qualifying paper to defend in January. I took the class as an independent study with my major professor over the summary and was able to complete Chapter 1. Right now I am working to complete Chapter 2, the literature review and Chapter 3, the methods section. I am on a hold right now as I am expecting baby number 3 in a couple weeks. I plan to have the proposal done in late December to submit to my committee and then defend in January.
My department held a meeting last week regarding the writing process that really aligned to what we talked about in one of my classes this past week. We were told that it was a smart process to complete the literature review before the introduction in order to make changes in the research questions and focus. Unfortunately, I have already written my introduction so there will be edits to that once I complete my literature review. I am about seven pages into my literature review and it is a culmination of many different papers that I have written over the last three years. I am lucky enough to have had a focus pretty early on in my PhD pursuit and it hasn't changed very much throughout the classes I have taken. Someone told me many classes ago that once I found a topic that interested me to focus on that and try to write all my papers for my classes with that topic in mind. I have done so and the result is a pretty large library of peer reviewed articles related to the gap in research that I am exploring.
I wish I had started using ref works from the beginning. My largest problem is that I have all these articles stored all over my computer based on what class I was taking at the time that I was writing a specific paper. I am in dire need to go through collect all the amazing articles I have read over the last three years and categorize them before I continue with my lit review. This will help as I continue to write chapter 2 relating to the current research done in this field and on this topic. So that is my goal now. I feel good about APA and citing references. I need to work with the UNT dissertation handbook and make sure that I understand the differences between that and APA, but I am not very worried about that as I have been assured that editing can help ensure my dissertation will be what UNT wants.
WIsh me luck!
