I’ve been working on a long paper / rough dissertation draft for my advisor. As of this morning I was up to about 30 pages, including both smooth-ish text and some notes to myself, along with some text retained from earlier drafts of this effort.

As this eventually needs to get into the standard dissertation template, and it’s easier to write in the required template than to write someplace else and copy into the template (Word formatting quirks can be a royal pain in the butt), I decided to transfer my writing to date into the dissertation template and continue writing from there.

A double-spaced template is a wonderful thing. I instantly went from a 30 page draft to one exceeding 70 pages. By the time I was done writing for the day, I was up to 78 pages total. That assumes I don’t do any more writing, but I probably will. I have plans for a nice cigar and a glass of Scotch this evening, and I always write better with a stogie to stimulate the muse.

I met with my advisor on Wednesday the 12th to discuss the status of my research, my progress to date, and his comments on an outline I have him back at the start of the summer. (The outline was supposed to be the skeleton for a journal article that would in turn be a very high-level rough draft of my dissertation. I even sent him a draft of the article. But I guess he missed that.)

Anyway, he had comments on my outline. Nothing too outrageous, just some additional topics to mention. But he sent me off to begin fleshing it out, and he told me to go into all the depth I could — getting to 120 pages was not a problem at all. This encouraged me to think that this is in fact the start of my dissertation, so I asked him how realistic it would be to graduate by the end of the calendar year.

His reply was that it depended on how much writing I could do combined with whether my committee thought I needed to do any additional work beyond what I’ve already done. He also mentioned that we may want to convene my committee again in October to show them my results to date and discuss the matter with them.

So, it would appear I am actually writing my dissertation, or at least an early draft. I’ve been head-down on it all weekend, and with the original draft material I had I’m up to about 25 pages including references.

I really am starting to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel. But it remains to be seen whether it is the exit or an oncoming train. Only time will tell.

The paper I submitted to the ASONAM 2012 conference got rejected, but they offered to accept it to one of the related workshops. Luckily it was already within the 6 page workshop limit, so cleaning it up and getting it camera ready was pretty easy.

Other than that, I haven’t been doing much except working on my prototype and the long paper / draft dissertation my advisor wanted me to work on. I need to spend more time on both of them, but I am making some progress. Most of what I’ve done lately is flesh out the ontology I’m using for the prototype. It’s not the most interesting work in the world, but it needs to get done.

Last week was a good one. To begin with, I learned that the paper I submitted to the Service Research and Innovation Institute 2012 Global Conference was accepted. I have some updates to make, but that’s pretty standard. And I’ve got a couple of extra pages to work with before I hit the page limit, so that’s not a concern.

Second, I met with my dissertation committee on Thursday afternoon to give them an update on my progress and to get any suggestions or course corrections early, with an aim of defending my dissertation in the fall. Well, I met with 3/4 of the committee; one member was on travel and I’ll meet with him one-on-one this coming Wednesday.

I can’t say the dissertation committee meeting was “pleasant,” but it is what I wanted. They put me through a bit of a wringer, but not on my research as such. The bigger issue was that I was not presenting it in the form of “this is a missing area of human knowledge and here’s how I’m going to fill it in.” Instead, I was presenting it partly as “here’s what we talked about a year ago at my proposal defense” (which they didn’t recall) and partly as “here’s the practical use of what I’m doing.”

The latter presentation style is what I deal with day-to-day at work; I’m an engineer and my customers know what their problem is. The reason they’re listening to me is that they want to hear a solution. But academia is a different matter entirely–they want to hear about what the problem is and why previous work hasn’t solved it; any practical considerations are of secondary or tertiary interest. So that’s a definite lesson learned: make the problem statement a huge piece of the discussion right up front.

A pleasant surprise was that the committee seems to think the service description I’ve been working on is a bigger part of my results that I thought. And that’s excellent news for me, as I wasn’t really sure if that was as big a deal as I’d hoped or not.

There was one additional good development: My advisor wants me to begin work on a lengthy paper, sort of a mini-dissertation, that lays out all the work we’ve done over the past year or so, soup-to-nuts, so that we can submit it to a journal (as well as having it serve as a dissertation draft). So I guess I need to add another category to this blog: Dissertation.