As has been pointed out by a few of friends and acquaintances, I have been slack with updating regarding my thesis progress. This is due to a number of reasons – the most obvious is that the majority of my time has been to actually writing the damn thing. I have my intro more or less drafted (however, it is in a fairly preliminary stage at the moment though). I’m not sure what week I am up to (you might have noticed I was blogging in terms of weeks before) but at this stage I have roughly about eight weeks to go before submission.
A few weeks back my supervisor was a bit wary about my progress, after I submitted a fairly rushed introduction and chapter summary. I had been working between 70 and 80 hours for the two weeks prior to submitting this – the majority of this spent on paid work (I had a urgent database project to prepare for a client). This unfortunately took a lot of time away from my thesis . The key lesson here is organisation, as well as not taking on more than you can chew. After a proverbial kick in the pants, I redid my introduction and chapter summary and thus gained the confidence of my supervisor!
In other news, I had a presentation just last week in front of several of my peer historians. I had panicked somewhat and had a substantial amount of points to cover. My supervisor instructed me that the best way to approach the presentation was to concentrate on how much primary research I had done – the meat and potatoes of the historian – rather than concentrate on my own interpretations (that can come later). I approached it by introducing my subject (Phrenology in 19th century America), covering existing scholarly interpretations, before launching into a ten minute discussion on what my sources were showing me about how phrenology was practised and communicated during my elected time period. I concluded by stating what more information I required to look into, and how my thesis was tentatively structured to answer the questions raised by my primary research material. I had a few questions at the end, but I nothing I didn’t feel I couldn’t handle or answer appropriately. Many thanks to Geri and Steph for coming along to lend moral support (and also to bring to my attention my nervous overuse of the adjective “basically†– I’ve killed it from my vernacular now).
One thing I’ve noticed over the course of the last few months is my newfound ability to write a lot of content (whether its good content or not is another matter entirely). Reading documents is still extremely time-consuming, but I’m lucky that I have a few days off paid-work at Easter too really kill some of the workload. I have also built a small database to help me keep track of how many hours I’m studying per week (my supervisor has suggested a minimum of 30 hours, which I have been more or less exceeding on any given week). The database also helps as a tool for organising my notes (in a way Endnote cannot).
Well, that’s pretty much all from me. I’ll be most likely be bogged down in reading 19th century newspapers and texts for the next few weeks, but hopefully I’ll have something to write about next week.
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