After four rounds of revisions with my advisor, I have sent my 141-page, 24,821-word dissertation to my committee, and have begun the process of scheduling my oral dissertation defense for the first or second week of May.
Yes, it’s happening.
Frankly, it feels a bit unreal. If all goes well, I will have a new title within a month. 21 years of education will have finally concluded. And then we’ll be moving into a new house. That we bought.
I’ve also been in contact with the powers-that-be at Old Dominion (my new job) to get my lab equipment purchased. It’s looking pretty good. When all is said and done, I’ll have 1) my office, 2) a miniature film studio, complete with green screen, 3) a graduate student working lab, 4) a presentation area, complete with projector and 100″ screen, and 5) a 20-system configurable computer lab with a master control system/server. Let the research begin!
As for the unexpected trouble last time, it turns out that there’s not much to worry about. The flooring allowance can be dealt with by moving it into an addendum, the agreement we need to sign has probably already been signed and I am the victim of a form letter, and considering our cash reserves, a sizable student loan payment doesn’t really matter – it’s just bank policy to source any non-payroll deposit larger than $500. So there’s not really anything to worry about.
But these things are always so much clearer in hindsight, aren’t they?
Courtesy organichealthblog.com
Problems with the house. Apparently, there are several “issues” with our mortgage application that the bank only decided to let us know about two weeks before closing. Well, technically they sent the letter April 8, but it only arrived April 14. The problem is that they gave us a deadline of April 18 (four days!) for them to have received everything they asked for, which unfortunately is a fairly tall order.
#1) They don’t like our flooring allowance. We had it written into the contract that the sellers would provide us several thousand dollars in cash in order to replace the floors in the entire house, which are all quite old and/or badly installed. Because of this, the bank wants us to decrease the sales price of the house by that same amount, which effectively saddles the sellers with double the cost – not only are they giving us that amount, but they will receive that amount less for the sale of the house. Which doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Doesn’t that mean that our flooring allowance would cost the sellers double? Our real estate agent is trying to figure out what to do about this.
#2) An agreement must be signed by the seller, buyer, and selling agent. They don’t specify what this agreement is or how to get it. I don’t think this would be that much of a concern except for the four day time limit.
#3) I received a student loan payment in February of a fairly substantial sum. We don’t need this money for the down payment, but since it’s on my income history, the bank wants documentation of where it came from, as when you have an FHA loan, you can’t use another loan to pay the mortgage loan. Why not just ignore it? Why harass me about it!?
Anyway, I’m a little stressed, since all of this comes in the middle of a daily back-and-forth with my advisor on drafts of my completed dissertation, which I am basically working on from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, every day, with short gaps to deal with the class I’m teaching, writing this blog post, and mundane wastes of time like showering or eating. I called our loan officer, but she has not returned my call.
…
Update 4/15: Apparently mortgage companies use form letters. Concern #1 can be dealt by moving the verbiage to an addendum. Apparently if the wording is in the contact itself, it has to be considered part of the sale, but if it’s an addendum, it doesn’t. It’s times like these that I wish I had a background in law. Concern #2 was apparently dealt with on the original contract we signed, not that anyone told me that before. Concern #3 is legitimate, but just involves me sending a fax to prove that the money was from a student loan and not from some other unspecified, nefarious source. I’m not sure why it matters, but apparently it does! In any case: situation resolved. I just wish it could have occurred a week later!
Courtesy claufont.net/Sfondi/Feste
The tables for my dissertation are done. I ran a total of 93 individual meta-analyses and produced 40 pages of tables over the last two days. My fingers hurt. It’s a lot like that feeling you get after finishing a long in-class essay exam and your hand naturally tries to cave in on itself. I imagine the Easter bunnies above rubbing their fur on my poor, broken digits.
For those of you that don’t know, a meta-analysis (in this case) is a quantitative summary of findings across many studies, weighted by sample size. So, for example, say Study 1 examined 50 people and found a correlation of 0.5, and Study 2 examined 300 people and found a correlation of 0.2. Meta-analysis takes both of those findings and produces a “weighted average” correlation, which is nudged closer to those studies that had lots of people (because more people = less random statistical variation).
You might think, “Well why not just look at each study individually and see what they did?” The answer is – well, that’s what people usually do, which is called, simply, a literature review. The problem is that literature reviews often conflict. Multiple reviewers might interpret the importance of a single study differently. Meta-analysis is a smidge more objective.
I say a smidge because there are still many subjective decisions made in how to create a meta-analysis. In fact, for my dissertation, I am re-creating and expanding upon a published meta-analysis because I disagree with some of the decisions the previous author made. I think the implications of those decisions might have led her to conclude the opposite of what she should have.
And so far – it looks like I’m right. I still need to stare at my 40 tables to come up with full list of conclusions I’d like to make, and augment those 40 tables with additional, explanatory tables, but for the most part, my data analysis is complete. At least until my adviser rips it apart.