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.