" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

I started writ­ing this post in an empty apart­ment. My hus­band got a job in Cal­i­for­nia and so the last few weeks were busy with prepa­ra­tions, both mate­r­ial and emo­tional, for the “big move” West. Mov­ing takes up emo­tional space: when you’re not fill­ing out change of address forms and can­cel­ing util­i­ties, you’re run­ning “the list” through your head and expect­edly, my dis­ser­ta­tion has slowed to a crawl. Big life changes are always a chal­lenge when work­ing on a the­sis or dis­ser­ta­tion, but they don’t have to be fatal for your project.

Here are some steps to keep up with your dis­ser­ta­tion dur­ing major life events:

1) Don’t over­promise. We went to Oak­land to house-hunt and when I returned I thought three weeks was suf­fi­cient time to com­plete my next chap­ter. This, in a nut­shell, was wildly opti­mistic. We had movers and pack­ers come and hav­ing never expe­ri­enced this before, I thought my job was done — that what­ever we had to do in the three weeks before our move was mar­ginal, leav­ing plenty of time for writ­ing. Ridicu­lous! I barely scraped together a 4 page out­line for my final writ­ing group meet­ing. Les­son? Don’t do this. If you’re mov­ing, give your­self a month before and a month after to get back into the swing of things, and if you can help it, don’t promise ANYTHING.

2) Check in. When going through a move, you don’t have to aban­don your work, at least, not alto­gether. It helps me to check in with my work, as a reminder. I make it a point to write a 200 word abstract on my cur­rent chap­ter as a writ­ing exer­cise. I keep that abstract in it’s own scrivener page and check in to read it as often as I can. When I do read the abstract, I jot down a few notes and ques­tions in the same doc­u­ment so I have a record of my thoughts. This coun­ter­acts a major hin­drance to writ­ing: momen­tum loss. If I’m away from work too long, I for­get what I was work­ing on. And when I for­get, I grow increas­ingly anx­ious about where to go next because I don’t remem­ber where I was going when I started. Check­ing in keeps your head in the game.

3) Meet with your com­mit­tee and/or writ­ing group. I met with two com­mit­tee mem­bers before I left New York and they gave great feed­back for next steps. I also pre­sented a 4-page out­line to my writ­ing group for feed­back on next steps, clar­ity, and orga­ni­za­tion. I recorded all meet­ings and once we’re set­tled, first thing on my “To-Do List” is to tran­scribe those meet­ing notes. I will then form those notes into a to-do list that I will use to get started again.

4) Be easy on your­self. If you’re any­thing like me, you’re scared to death of tak­ing too much time away from your dis­ser­ta­tion, for fear of los­ing “it.” But lis­ten, a move is a BFD and incred­i­bly stress­ful, so get a new shower cur­tain and wel­come mat, the work will always be there.