Thesis Coaching

I’m really glad I went to a meeting on how to complete your thesis at school today (web site of the consultant who presented). Yes, I went to school at 9:30am on a Saturday. I’m not as flipped out as some about the process, but I’m doing a masters & most were PhD students. I’m a fan of this productivity stuff, GTD, next actions, etc. for almost a year now, but I was really stuck on how to apply it to my thesis. I came out with some concrete ideas about how to break it down into something manageable.

The thing I’m worried about right now is that maybe my method is too much to complete properly in the time frame I have. I’m proposing preliminary interviews that will help develop a survey and concurrently doing a content analysis. I’ve got a lot more experience doing interviews and participant observation, but I think this project calls for the survey and content analysis & I’d like to broaden my bag of tricks so to speak.

The other worry is if I’ve covered all the relevant areas of literature - or rather, planned to do so. It’s an impossible task of course, but I’ll just have to live with some ambiguity and ask my advisor, committee, fellow students, and everyone else I meet along the way I suppose. I’ll get that on my next actions list I suppose.

I’m getting some feedback Monday from my advisor so after I finish grading speeches for Thursday I should be back on track.