Taking Steps (Not 39, Though It Feels Like It)

Good news this week!

Step 1: I have gotten a $1,400 grant from the university to present my research at a very good marketing conference in May. (As in, $1,400 to cover the costs of travel, hotel, etc.) Woo! My professor is awesome for doing all the paperwork, shepherding, etc., involved in this.

Step 3a: I should finish the paper I am submitting.

Step 3b: I guess I should also make it good enough to be accepted.

I made some good progress toward Step 3 on Friday - a lot of straightforward writing, but also finishing up some naggling loose ends, like finding an appropriate source to reference when I posit here that XYZ is the case and finding the actual number that I should put in the place that currently reads "X%" and so on. I also had a couple of moments along the lines of "hey, there are policy implications of this, yay" since the conference focuses on that kind of thing.

Step 2: But I also need to collect more data! So there is a limit to how far I can progress on Step 3. (I've got a limited amount of infrastructure in place for the results section, but obviously can't really write the whole thing yet.)

I spent about 6 hours doing differential equations homework today. It's almost scary how on top of this material I feel (and appear, objectively, to be, given my quiz grades and how I plowed through the homework today, surprising myself with one correct answer after another). So all is well on the DE front.

This past week I got super-organized on grad school applications also.

Step 1: I have my final list of 7 programs, subject to hearing back from Virginia Tech (aka VT) as to whether they will accept my GRE scores in place of the GMAT. If they say no, as I am starting to strongly anticipate, I will just go to 6 programs.

Step 2: I have recorded all the information for each program about what they are expecting when, and developed the list of known unknowns that I need to follow up with each program about. I had been dreading this step, but it wasn't so bad. (I guess after all the mammoth projects I've managed in my career, this is going to be an easy one; I mean, first of all, everything is being done in English, which I have not always been able to rely on.)

Step 3: I have ordered my transcripts (except the ones for VT), which was kind of a pain in the ass because I have 4 different colleges to get them from and each program has requirements about whether they want them from me with my bundle o' application stuff or directly from the college. UT, by the way, continues to be a School of Suckitude in that they charged $10 per transcript (esp. annoying for one stinkin' class!); Rice and TSU charged $5, and TCC charged $0.

Step 4: I have ordered GRE score reports for all of the schools (except the one for VT).

Step 5: I have started the online applications for each program and have completed a significant amount of the "easy" stuff.

Step 6: Writing the statement of purpose, generally considered the most difficult part of the process. I was cheered up when I read a philosophy professor's blog in which he said that he has never seen a first draft of a SOP that was any good at all. Maybe the fact that my own first draft ended up so disappointing is not a bad sign, but represents a typical stage of the progression from Not Any Good at All to Good Enough. I am going to work on my third approach tomorrow.

I worked on a second approach and wasn't pleased with it. I basically have not come up with an interesting "hook" a la telling an interesting story in the first paragraph to grab the adcom's interest. The examples are always how watching megafauna on the Serengeti plain got me interested in biology, how watching my father save the life of a woman on a private airplane while simultaneously flying the aircraft to safety convinced me that I should dedicate myself to becoming a doctor and inventing superior airplane autopilot technology, how my childhood being raised by wolves has impacted my perspective on sociology, or whatever. To tell a "story" about getting interested in psychology while heeding the no-doubt vital advice that it's a mistake to talk about the psychological issues of yourself or anybody you know is kind of difficult, I think.

Well, here's one: "The most fascinating and frustrating part of the experiment I conducted for my paper A Case of Balance Disturbance in a Domestic Cat (unpublished) actually occurred after the formal experiment was over. While happy to have put a frequently-held, but at that time scientifically unsubstantiated claim to the empirical test (see enclosed writing sample), my satisfaction was short-lived. I found myself unprepared to make sense of the cat's behavior once he was released from the experiment. In-depth investigations of the literature did not reveal any extant theory to explain the cat's actions. Since that time, I have dedicated myself to exploring the social psychology of trans-species interactions in the context of close relationships, with a particular focus on displays of emotion toward humans."

Step 7: Once I have well and truly finalized the list of programs, which keeps threatening to occur, but never quite makes it - it's sort of like those projects at work that get a series of file names like Winters Report Final.doc, Winters Report Final Revised.doc, Winters Report Final Revised with Bobs Edits.doc, Winters Report Final Revised with Bobs Edits Finalized.doc, Winters Report Final Revised with Bobs Edits Finalized June 10 2008 Version.doc, Winters Report Final THIS IS THE ONE IGNORE ALL OTHERS.doc - I get to do the part I am dreading most, which is approaching professors to write my recommendations. I have no real reason to think this will be difficult or unpleasant; I just don't like having to do anything that smacks of "asking for the sale."