MA Thesis Update
I will have another post soon about my trip to South America, but today I am working on my thesis and I wanted to start by posting here on my news.
The big news is that after a meeting with my advisor today, I emailed my committee to see if they could all be down for my thesis defense on May 6th.
WHOA.
That means I need to have the final draft out to my committee by April 22.
WHOA!!!
I have been meeting weekly with another medical anthropology writing-buddy for the past month or two so that I would spend at least one day a week focused on writing, and that has helped me make progress. But the biggest progress has come from focusing my final papers for the last 3-4 semesters on the data from my interviews. That's four 15-20 page final papers. Four papers that I thought we pretty good and would help me WRITE my MA thesis. Turns out, when my advisor read them, she thought they should just BE my MA thesis. Rearranged, edited down, expanded in the right ways, but still, THAT WRITING should pretty much just BE my MA thesis (which should be 60-80 pages). In addition, I've got the 12 page paper I presented at the American Anthropology Association in the Fall.
Even better? The final papers for the two classes I'm taking this semester - one called the Anthropology of Adolescence, and the other called the Crossroads Collaborative: Youth, Health, Sex, and Rights - are going to be the first and second chapters of that thesis. So I'll have those done!
AND the paper/presentation I'm making for the Society for Applied Anthropology conference next week will be the applied thing that I can give back to the organization that I worked with for observation and recruitment. Awesome-sauce.
How did this happen? How did this get so far along when I felt like I was doing so little? Crazy ...
The big news is that after a meeting with my advisor today, I emailed my committee to see if they could all be down for my thesis defense on May 6th.
WHOA.
That means I need to have the final draft out to my committee by April 22.
WHOA!!!
I have been meeting weekly with another medical anthropology writing-buddy for the past month or two so that I would spend at least one day a week focused on writing, and that has helped me make progress. But the biggest progress has come from focusing my final papers for the last 3-4 semesters on the data from my interviews. That's four 15-20 page final papers. Four papers that I thought we pretty good and would help me WRITE my MA thesis. Turns out, when my advisor read them, she thought they should just BE my MA thesis. Rearranged, edited down, expanded in the right ways, but still, THAT WRITING should pretty much just BE my MA thesis (which should be 60-80 pages). In addition, I've got the 12 page paper I presented at the American Anthropology Association in the Fall.
Even better? The final papers for the two classes I'm taking this semester - one called the Anthropology of Adolescence, and the other called the Crossroads Collaborative: Youth, Health, Sex, and Rights - are going to be the first and second chapters of that thesis. So I'll have those done!
AND the paper/presentation I'm making for the Society for Applied Anthropology conference next week will be the applied thing that I can give back to the organization that I worked with for observation and recruitment. Awesome-sauce.
How did this happen? How did this get so far along when I felt like I was doing so little? Crazy ...