It begins - officially

Monday is the official start of my dissertation-writing process. In our school's jargon, I "start the clock" on January 9. What this means is that I can send my officially-accepted concept paper to the professor I want to chair my committee, along with the form for her to accept the job. She will contact the professor I want to be my "reader" or second person on the committee, and if that person is okay with it, I will then send her the concept paper with another form. Then I have to find a third person who has a PhD in a relevant field but is not associated with Pacifica to be my "external reader." Those people will be my committee.

Next step is the proposal. The concept paper was just to prove to the Research Coordinator, one of our professors, that I have a reasonably good sense of what I will have to do to write a good dissertation. The proposal consists of the first two chapters of the actual work, to show that I can actually do what I'd said I would do. I send that to the chair and reader with another form for them to sign off on. Only then will I have permission to go ahead with my topic as planned. Which is a bit scary considering I've written quite a bit of it already. At least one of my cohort has already run into the problem of a chair who thinks she should do something very different from what she wants to do, and one of my friends in the class a year ahead of us totally rewrote her concept paper after she'd started her clock. But given that I'm asking the professor who helped me write my concept paper in the first place to be my chair, and she loves my idea and has told me she wants to be my chair, I'm not too worried.

Chapter 1 is done. My (potential) chair has already warned me she won't be ready to read anything until February, which means I have a month to get Chapter 2 drafted. I'm now settled into my new place, finally got the DSL installed, and the holiday visiting is over as of yesterday, so it is TIME TO WORK.