This course in my doctoral program is all about me working with my mentor to get things in line for my proposal. Alas, I’ve not been to active in class. Evidence of this came last night with a stern message from my Academic Counselor that cautioned me to post in class or risk being auto-dropped.
Why the inactivity? A few reasons actually but none enough to warrant my lack of activity. First, I’ve been reading a lot about my revised topic and problem statement. Second, I’ve been reading and writing a new employee onboarding program which has had the deadline moved up 4 weeks and been given no additional resources of staff to make this happen with the same quality. Third, I have a big idea (not something I want to share yet) about a potential business and have been doing the market trend research on that idea.
At some point this week I need to stop reading and start writing. Which is not to say, stop reading. It is to say start turning that reading into some activity. Start processing all the journals and all the knowledge into something valuable for my process as a doctoral student. This happened once before, I get paralyzed in wanting to know all there is to know about a subject and before long I am down the rat hole on topics I either don’t know or don’t need to know that much about.
Last night’s plane ride to Kansas City gave me the time to reflect on that behavior and I came to realize that my quality standards drive my wanting to know it all behavior. At some point, I need to take that quality standard aspect and turn it over into a quality of writing attitude. Blogging has been helping me move forward, just writing keeps the wheels greased so writer’s block does not set in.
Writing is important enough to my dissertation that I need to make this a priority today. Not only that but I was listening to Jeffrey Gitomer’s How to not Suck at Sales audiobook on the plane and was reminded about how important writing is to the career of a knowledge worker. So, I am writing, this post and then my proposal. Look for something to be posted here as I get things re-written. I’ll caution you ahead of time that academic writing is boring on the highest order, but I’ll add some stuff that keeps you engaged; I promise.
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April 14th, 2009 at 7:50 PM
Mike:
I too am in the same class along the doctoral journey at Univ of Phoenix. The mentor class is difficult because the sylabus does not provide the detail of where you need to be at the end of the class. It is now the end of the class and I am working to incorporate committee members comments on chapters 1,2 and 3, finish appendices for survey instruments, permission forms, and attempting to put together the 5 forms for submission to ARB/IRB. These items are time consuming, particulary permission steps. Suddenly, ABD doesn’t sound so bad. Good luck.
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