Light and Momentary

News!

I just got a job offer! It's a half-time postdoc starting in August -- it would let me focus on writing up the work I've been doing as a doc student without any teaching responsibilities. It is exactly what I would like to do next year, and I can do most of it from home. Hurray!

Verdict

Pass! Minimal revisions, enthusiastic committee. Relieved and thankful and a little bit disbelieving.

Accomplish My Going Forth

Tomorrow at noon I will defend my dissertation. Please pray for me if you're so inclined. I'll try to update afterward via text message.

Blargh

Remember when I told you that my defense was open to the public and (HA HA HA) you could come if you were in town? and listen to my talk about my dissertation for two hours? Remember?

Well, guess who's coming to my open-to-the-public defense! Guess!

[wait, you can't really guess without more backstory]

Accomplish My Going Forth

Today -- o frabjous day, callooh callay -- I finished a draft of the last chapter of my dissertation.

In my field a dissertation is usually four chapters. In the first, you explain why this is an interesting question and what other people have said about it. In the second, you spell out what you're going to do. I wrote the first two chapters in the fall of '08 in preparation for my prelim, and then rewrote chapter 2 last summer and fall to reflect what I actually did. Chapter 3 describes your results -- that's the 40-page monster I sent off earlier this week. Chapter 4 is discussion -- what it all means, how it fits into existing research, what questions you've raised for other researchers to consider.

I've been working on chapter 4 in small bites for a while. After all the coding and analyzing it's been really fun to be opinionated. Sometimes I would just open the document and throw in a quick note to myself: this measure of vocabulary diversity = BAD. Later I would go back and put it into researcher-ese.

My mother-in-law came down yesterday and stayed overnight, and I've been writing up a storm while she watches the kids -- fixing the earlier bits and tying them together, and writing writing writing all the pieces that still needed to be written. I just finished. The last word is "hope." :-)

Way back when I was in the second semester of this program, Arwen left me a comment about asking for the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas and Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. I thought, "Hey, what a great pair of intercessors." I have asked for their prayers every day since then. It seems perfectly right for me to finish this draft on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.

I need to review this draft before I send it off to my advisor, and I will have plenty of revisions to do in the next 3.5 weeks before the document is ready to go to my committee. But you know, once it's written down, you've got something to work with.

I am going to hug my kids, and see if they're willing to go to Mass with me this evening. I am so relieved. Tired, too, but mostly relieved.

The View from Here

1. Finally, after months of wrangling with thousands of data points, I have a completed draft of my results chapter. I just wrote the last paragraph. That, my friends, was a big job. (It's not over, of course. I have typed and deleted six different versions of this sentence, torn between celebrating the accomplishment and acknowledging that plenty of revising lies ahead.)
2. After, like, six years of unremitting grayness (all right, maybe it's only been 10 days), the sun is peeking out.
3. I am bundling up the baby and taking her out to enjoy the sunshine with me before we pick up the boys.

Rubber, This Is Road; Road, Rubber

Last February I spoke at a retreat about especially helpful things I'd learned over the previous ten years. Part of the talk was about striving to give generously to God -- to tithe, to offer back Sundays as a day of rest and worship, to be generous in the service of life.

[Interruption: I feel a burning need to clarify the tone here. It was not about me sailing from victory to victory, with nary a doubt or a moment's foot-dragging. It was me saying, "I don't want to; I'm scared to; I can't," followed by God saying, "How about if you try it first?" It was years of God saying, "Trust me, Jamie, with your money and your time and your body," and me saying, "Careful! Are you being very careful there? I'm not sure you're being careful enough!" Afterward I found myself saying, "...Who'd'a' thunk it? I feel...rested? and provided for? and blessed? Who knew?" This was about Jamie as Slow Learner, not Jamie as any kind of Uber-Disciple.]

--anyway, I told them earnestly, "No one ever says, 'Look at that, I have an extra day in my week and an extra 10% in my budget! I think I'll rest on Sundays and tithe!'" I believe that the decision comes first and then the pieces can fall into place around it. It is a truism that you cannot out-give God, but I was still astonished to see the fruits of those choices.

Right at this moment, though, I am feeling the pinch. I told my advisor that I would have a complete draft of my dissertation to her by Friday. Whoa, I just got a little woozy typing that. Friday. The prospect of taking off to a coffee shop tomorrow afternoon and working away in the quiet is very tempting. Is it necessary work? Probably not. Will I feel better on Monday if I take tomorrow off? I am certain I will.

My littlest blessing is snoring in my lap right now. If I could have picked the week when she would get so sick, it sure wouldn't have been this one. But you know, if I could have picked the year when she would arrive in our family, it wouldn't have been 2008. Now I am so glad she came along when she did. So I am trying to roll with it, and give her and my dissertation what they need at the same time. (Elwood took that picture after I'd been kneeling in front of the couch crunching numbers one-handed for ... I don't know, 20 minutes? The baby didn't want to be put down even after she fell asleep, and I was determined to finish a particular section of chapter 3 before nightfall. She complained when I sat down, so I knelt instead. Please ignore the festive stripes of ibuprofen and amoxicillin on my shirt where she spewed them in protest.)

It's also pinch season financially -- I got behind on giving during the last quarter of '09, and caught up in the last week of the year. Those credit card bills are coming due and I am juggling figures in my head, trying to keep us on track. Everything taken together, right at this moment, makes me want to say "Generous schmenerous!"

This post is me taking myself by the shoulders and saying, "Let's not go back to remedial class. We know better than that." I believe God is faithful through lean seasons and sicknesses and weeks when I just don't know how it's all going to get done. So. The decision is made and I'm going to trust that the pieces will fall into place. (But if I'm scarce this week, you'll know what I'm up to.)

One thing is missing...

I have a date for my defense. The form requesting that my committee be approved has been signed by the department head and forwarded to the college. I just got the secretary's note confirming that she'd reserved a room in which I can present my findings to my committee. (And anyone else who wants to come. It's open to the public, so hey, if you're in town...)

All I need is a dissertation. It is bending my brain around right now. I had a slightly freaked-out phone conversation with my advisor today when I discovered that one of my sibling pairs might have been misclassified. I said, "I'm feeling a little behind. Are you worried?"

She said, "No, I'm not worried." She said, "I am sure that between the two of us we can bang this out."

I hope she's right.

Kindly Light

The more I learn, the less I know.

Earlier in the program I was much more confident. Maybe I didn't know something, but I was going to figure it out. All through the dissertation stage I have been plagued with doubt. Last January: I'm not going to able to figure out the morpheme coding. (Remember my friend Vlad?) In March: I'm not going to be able to come up with a reasonable strategy for measuring low-frequency vocabulary. In May: I'm never going to finish this syntax analysis. In July: I'm not going to be able to understand the multilevel modeling book. In September: I can't use R to analyze my results because it's too hard.

Only some of this is pessimism. It has been a hard slog, requiring me to use many new tools. All along the way there have been flashes of insight, moments of inspiration, offers of unexpected assistance. 

One of the things I love about this prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas is its recognition that God who is omniscient as well as all-holy calls us out of both ignorance and sin -- that we can honor God through learning about the world he has made. I was thinking about this in the small hours of this morning, pacing with a wakeful baby and pondering, mercifully, not my sleep deprivation but the wonder of creation. The heavens are telling the glory of God, from galaxies to gluons. (The psalmist, of course, didn't mention this one, but I kept thinking, "ATP. ATP is evidence for the existence of God." It seems less convincing now than it did at 2am.)

I told my advisor that I was going to try to finish my model-building this week, which is going to require a lot of work. I need answers to some hard questions (e.g., what is going on with that funky U-shaped relationship between two of my moderating variables?). It would be easy for me to feel overwhelmed.

But do you know, I wrote this post yesterday, and saved it in my drafts folder so I could add the links. Already I am feeling like I have reasonable answers to a couple of the questions that were vexing me. I do not expect that all of my work this week will go as smoothly, but I am encouraged.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

On The Calendar

One of my committee members has a busy clinical practice -- so busy that a two-hour meeting with him must be scheduled three months in advance. I am going to defend my dissertation on March 10, it looks like.

This means I have to finish writing the thing between now and then.

Hamster Wheel, Paused

Stella and I made the trek to campus today, and it was a good trip. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my advisor? I love love LOVE my advisor. She is A-OK with the fact that my baby and I are a package deal at this point. She doesn't mind if I keep Stella nearby during meetings with students. She is happy to schedule phone meetings to talk about my dissertation, or if I am coming to town she is willing to walk around campus while we talk, so that the baby can watch squirrels instead of eating computer cables in her office.

Today we took some time to talk about my mental hamster wheel, and she said, "What's most important is what you want to do. Not what your husband wants, or what your mother wants, or what I might expect. What would you like your life to look like next year?"

I told her that if the half-time post-doc were local, I would jump on it. The commute worries me, though. It's hard on my family if I'm away more than one day a week.

And do you know what she said? She said, "I don't see why we would expect more face time of a half-time post-doc than we would of a full-time doctoral student. It depends on who's mentoring you, of course, but I think one day a week on campus would be fine."

One day a week I could do. Maybe Elwood would go back to working 4 ten-hour days each week, or maybe I would take Stella along with me. I know some mothers in that community and I'm optimistic about finding a home where she could play while I was in the office. Post-doc positions are flexible enough that I could bop over and nurse her down at naptime.

Funny that a ten-minute conversation could leave me feeling so much calmer.

Fifteen Years On

Fifteen years ago exactly, I was in the last semester of my MA program and writhing with anxiety about what came next. I had felt called into this field. After discerning the best I could I packed up my belongings and moved away from the big city to get a master's degree.

Next

I've started telling people that I'm going to graduate in the spring. If some kind of disaster strikes, like if I'm diagnosed with cancer next week or my husband runs off to live in Ixtapa with one of the interns, then I may curse my optimism. But I'm feeling confident enough that when people ask me how school is going, I tell them I should be done soon.

What they are supposed to say is, "Hey, that's great! What an accomplishment, finishing a PhD with five kids." Then I'm supposed to smile a satisfied but still modest smile and scuff my toe in the dirt.

What they could also consider saying is, "How's your dissertation coming together? I've always heard that last stage is tough." Then I could allow as to how it is pretty tough, between my recalcitrant stats program and the baby whose mission in life is to stuff into her mouth every choking hazard she can find.

What they actually say is, "What will you do next?" And I don't know yet.

I've been pretty calm about the whole thing, because I believe that God has a plan for me. I felt called into this program and I don't need to know the next step just yet. That, however, is a conversation I'm more likely to have with a good friend than with some random parent at soccer practice.

I have been hoping that something would open up at the university in my neighborhood, but I just didn't know how likely that was. I've been telling people that I would apply for a half-time post-doc that's based an hour away. I figured I could spend one long day on campus and work from home the rest of the time. I could also return to clinical work, even though that's not my favorite idea.

Today in between subsetting my data and making more pretty tables for chapter 3 of my dissertation, I looked at the faculty openings for the university in my neighborhood. There's nothing in the department that trains SLPs, but there are three tenure-track openings in a closely related department. On paper, at least, I have all the qualifications they're looking for.

No heavenly lights beamed down to spell out, "This is it, Jamie -- it's what you've been preparing for." I'm not sure if I should pursue a full-time appointment when baby Stella will still just be toddler Stella. (The department is a five-minute walk from my house, though, and I'm pretty sure a full-time load would be two courses per semester.)  

I'm going to apply, I think, and we'll see what happens next.

Garbage Out

The thing I love about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do.

The thing I hate about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do.

My dissertation dataset is much the largest set of numbers I've ever tried to wring any kind of meaning from, and the most basic number-crunching is proving to be a larger task than I'd anticipated. I came back from our vacation feeling relieved, because I'd been able to learn enough about multilevel modeling to take a stab at building models with my data. (It is revealing that one of the highlights of our vacation for me was the afternoon spent alone with a stats book and a sleeping baby, in which a couple of light bulbs finally flickered on. Thanks to my husband, who made it possible by wrangling four boys through a water park that sounds like his personal version of purgatory.)

I'm not going to be building models for a while. First I have to get my numbers to line up and stop giving each other noogies.

Last week I spent an embarrassing amount of time just getting some descriptive statistics into a usable format. Today I discovered that the format may be usable but the statistics are garbage.

Somehow when I said to R "take the year 2 tallies for low-frequency vocabulary and divide them by the year 2 utterance counts" -- somehow I actually said, "Please serve me up a heaping bowl of number salad." And R said, "Happy to oblige, and how about some exotic phthiraptera eggs on top?"

I cannot figure out what went awry. The numbers all look plausible but they are all wrong. And because computers do exactly what you tell them to do, it must be my own fault somehow. Argh and blast and FIE.

I Hate Personal Growth

Two years ago I was taking a class in regression analysis. During the week that my second son turned eight and I needed to produce Halloween costumes for four children, I also had a big stats assignment due. I was doing this assignment with a freebie student version of SAS when the computer on which it lived died a sudden and yet harrowing death.

Guess what I did today!

I finished coding transcripts for my dissertation. I'd been working on it 5 or 6 days a week since January. I started when the baby was just two weeks old, knowing that it would be harder when she was bigger than when she was tiny. It was a bigger undertaking than I thought it would be. More than once I kicked myself for being so ambitious in my prospectus.

But I finished.

Wow

Remember how I had resolved to slow down? Forty transcripts each week, no guilt no pressure? I did that for a bit and it was GREAT. Then the nudges started: finals are coming. You should speed up so you don't get behind while you're grading. If you just did one more transcript each day, you could get 46 done each week. That's more than 40, you know. More more more.

I am never sure how much detail to include about my dissertation, because I don't want to cause any glazed eyes or nodding-off-bashing-head injuries. So I'll try to be succinct. I'd been coding elaborated noun phrases. Kids start off saying "dog," and progress to "big dog," and eventually get to "the gigantic smelly dog that dug up my grandma's prize-winning tomato plants." A dearth of those more complex phrases is one of the things that distinguishes kids with weak language skills, especially when they're telling stories. I had also planned to do a syntax analysis on about half the transcripts. For about a third of them, one of my advisor's collaborators had already done the analysis, and a few dozen of them couldn't be analyzed because the kids didn't have enough to say. I would do the rest.

Oh, my.

Syntax is complicated. Kids can toss off a five-second utterance that takes me 10 minutes to sort out grammatically. (I hadn't used this approach since 1993, which is part of why it was so slow.) Even though I was picking up some speed as I went along, it was very very slow, painfully slow.

Yesterday I started thinking that maybe I should ask my advisor's former collaborator if he would consider helping me with this last analysis. She and I had discussed this possibility earlier in the process, but it just seemed like a crazy request. Hi! Want to do 50 hours' worth of work for me even though we hardly know each other? That's what it would take me: a bare bald minimum of 50 hours. Not just any 50 hours, either -- 50 hours of solid concentration. I find that I hit a wall with this kind of close analysis, too, so that even if I had no distractions whatsoever in my life, I couldn't possibly do it for more than four hours a day.

It seemed like a bold request, perhaps even a presumptuous request, but I felt this funny prompting to go ahead and make it. I asked for my advisor's input on the email I drafted to him, and I asked some friends to pray for me, and then I sent it off.

He said yes. YES!! He said he'd be GLAD to do it for me.

I am going to finish the year 3 syntax analyses, about another 30 of them, because I want to understand this approach. I still have to finish coding noun phrases for about 130 more transcripts. But! He is going to do the year 2 syntax analyses for me! Wow.

I feel like somebody just handed me a thousand dollars.

Do svidaniya, Vlad

I am done with morpheme analysis for all 301 transcripts. Huzzah! I am also done with some cleaning up that I didn't realize needed to happen with the first batch of transcripts. I am not done with the counting, which could require quite a bit more cleaning up, but I am going to be optimistic. It might just require a ten-minute chat with my advisor and a couple of lines of code. Whatever the rest of the week holds, it doesn't hold any more disambiguating.

Now for some nice refreshing washing of dishes and some even more refreshing grading. :-P

Halfway

Dun-da-da-DAH! Disambiguator Woman here in a pretend snazzy superhero outfit. I have just finished morpheme analysis for the 151st of my 301 transcripts. Now I am swooshing away in my imaginary purple cape to be Dishwasher Woman and Rosary Woman and Toothbrushing Woman and Very Tired Sleeping Woman.

Still Random But Happier

On Monday I started the year 1 transcripts and it became immediately evident that I would not meet my original goal of finishing morpheme analysis by the end of February. It was a relief, actually, to realize that I had to revise my schedule. Yesterday I had a phone conference with my advisor after the faculty meeting in which they review all the doc students' progress over the past year. I passed. She told me, in fact, that when my file came up, a few of the faculty joked that I should give out time management tips. (There are a couple of PhD students with one child, and one woman who has two children, but I am decidedly an oddity with my five. My only time management tips are to give away the TV and teach the kids to clean bathrooms and load the dishwasher.) We also talked for a while about what comes next. I am working on a timeline that she thinks is ambitious, but she also thought it was ambitious for me to try to get to candidacy before the baby arrived. I'd much rather be shooting for a goal that she thinks is optimistic than be told I needed to meet a deadline that seemed unrealistic to me. So that's good.

It's been almost three weeks since any baby pictures were posted on this blog, which is a situation that must be rectified. I call this one "Baby with Brothers and Laundry." (My MIL has been asking me to dress her in pink and take a picture. I never dress her in baby pink, you might remember, because I have always hated baby pink, but I finally obliged.) Here she is (still in pink! two whole pictures of her in pink!) with her oldest brother; here she is with the youngest. Joe and Pete made her a bed of stuffed animals, which she thought was intriguing and they thought was hilarious. Pete loves, LOVES to hold her and to be photographed holding her; she is sometimes uncertain that this is a good idea.

Alex is making sure that she'll know how to text-message before any of the other babies can do it. Pete's eyes are closed in this one but I love it anyway: he has his shirt hiked up too so he can nurse his baby, who shares his sister's name. I am realizing the 9yo is not in a single one of these recent pictures, which is another situation to rectify.

I was up late last night grading (late by postpartum standards, which is to say midnight), and that always jacks up the cranky potential for the next evening. I am going to go make onion soup, and fold laundry, and tidy up the living room. Which means I should end this post pronto. Catch you later.