I got the update to my paper for the DGSS12 conference completed and submitted, along with all of the associated copyright paperwork. and shortly after that, I learned the abstract I submitted to the Annual Service Research & Innovation Institute Global Conference was accepted. Granted, it’s not a publication. But it is a ticket to the dance, so to speak. Now I jsut need to do enough research to compile a worthy paper by February 29.

Toward that end, I met with my advisor this afternoon to discuss the direction the paper is going. We were generally thinking of the same things, but he did have an interesting idea to apply some social networking ideas that may offer enough novelty to make the paper very attractive to the reviewers (assuming I can pull it off). Even better, when I asked him how close I was to being done, he initially hedged his comments and told me that if I was diligent I should be able to graduate in May. By “diligent” I’m pretty sure he meant “if you work your @$$ off.” That was way more than I expected; I thought he’d say I have to work hard to finish by the end of year. So now I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to finish my research by the summer, and just worry about completing and defending my dissertation through the fall. That is way better news than I had hoped for.