Deadline Woes

Just when I was starting to feel good about some dissertation progress I was making, I had a realization that time is indeed running out. In other words, in order for me to finish and graduate in May, I have a lot that has to happen NOW.

As many of you know, I've been having trouble with my dissertation director, who seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time to read and respond to drafts. So after chatting with Jan (my second reader), I decided to talk to the Grad Director. Roberta, grad director, was wonderful, although I wasn't pleased that she said it's perfectly normal for faculty to take anywhere up to 6 weeks to respond to a draft. She had good insight about my director's tendencies, and so we created a timeline for my completion which I shared with him.

One thing I did not know about was that in order to finish and graduate by May (according to the Grad Handbook), I will need to have a full draft of my diss to my committee members 2 months before the grad college's final format check date! This means I need to have drafts of everything to them by Feb 21. This was a little earlier than I'd planned, but certainly do-able. The only thing I'm now worried about is getting my director to read, respond, and allow me time to revise AND get them to the committee members for their review BEFORE that deadline. You see, the deal is that they need to have seen drafts of chapters before that Feb 21 deadline at which time they see the whole thing.

Now, my director doesn't seem to like to allow me to send drafts to my committee members until he's 100% satisfied with them, which means upwards around 5-7 drafts of each chapter. That, coupled with his slow 2-7 week turnaround time to me, makes it nearly impossible for me to revise and have things to him in a timely manner, let alone sending drafts to others before Feb 21. I'm trying not to worry about this now (hard to do when one has OCD), and right now my only comfort is that I have the Grad Director informed and on my side in case he slows things too much. But the reality of it all is starting to sink in. As if writing the darn thing wasn't hard enough, why does one have to worry about deadline crap like this? Oy.

Add to this the new stress of thinking about Ken moving, me moving back to B-N, editing projects that are terrible this issue, Christmas present-buying stress, and I'm one distressed cookie.