Having met with both of my advisors almost two weeks ago and convinced the younger one that I’ve done enough work to claim victory, I’ve begun working with him on yet another draft of my dissertation. I won’t be throwing away all of my old work, but I am starting with a new outline and going from there.

The young guy is very much a stickler for getting the introduction and first couple of sections right, with the goal of convincing readers that I’ve got all my crap together and what follows will be a genuine contribution to the field.

I’ve been trying to meet with him weekly, or bi-weekly if I can, because there’s a LOT to get done if I am to complete my pre-defense by early April. Two (or was it three?) meetings got snowed out in the past couple of weeks, but I finally got to meet with him this past Monday. He had a lot of changes, almost a complete re-write of the introduction section, but it sounds like a good way to structure things.

I scheduled another meeting with him for yesterday (Thursday) afternoon to go over the re-written introduction. He clearly liked it a lot better than the previous version, but he still had more changes for me to work on. It’s a pain in some respects, but Susan informs me it was worth it because she went through the same process with him and had zero changes between her pre-defense and final defense. Hopefully she’s right.

In the meantime, I still need to schedule a date for my pre-defense. I sent a request for open dates to my committee, but I only got one reply. I guess I’ll just pick a date and see who objects.