Sunday, February 26, 2006

The next few goals

  • Literature review for next big long-term project (a longitudinal study).
  • Begin preparations/ideas/outlines for colloquium talk I'm giving in May
    • This is a talk in the department hosting my Visiting Scholar status (i.e. my second field)
    • I'm hoping to make some major strides toward a new methodology which I'm developing, as a spin-off and follow up on my dissertation work. That's what I'm hoping to present, so any early start is warranted. This new methodology would allow direct comparison of data across my two main fields, and should allow more fruitful interactions between them. And, these new techniques will be directly applicable to analysis of the data that I expect to be gathering for the longitudinal study.
    • I may likely need to do a thorough lit review on that as well, though as I am aware from the last few years of study, this is mostly new territory. But I need to be competent and well-versed in the methods that are currently in use in each field, so I can show where what I propose contributes something new to both fields.
  • Start planning grant applications, since I may likely remain a Visiting Scholar for another year.
  • Keep developing ideas for new articles, and possibly book proposals.
Here I am again, at the odd stage of having completed something big (like when I sent off the final version of the dissertation for approvals). Again, I have to sit back and wait on other people. But, like with job applications, I have to remind myself that my job is done in that (at least for now). It's best to simply move on. The more productive I am, the less obsessed I will be with the status of that paper, and frankly the less important that status will be. If I have two or three more irons in the fire, by the time I hear one way or the other, it shouldn't matter that much which I hear.

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