Final Final Papers
Working on the last of my class final papers, hopefully ever! Classes will be done next semester. It actually already feels like my work is on its own path regardless of classes.
At the last minute I decided to abandon the empirical paper I was writing for my Immigration Studies class and polish up a proposal I wrote last month that drew heavily on the class. Found my statistics skills weren’t all there yet, and that the dataset had a few major flaws for answering my questions.
So I’m revising this proposal, and am excited to get my professor’s feedback on it. Although I want to keep exploring some more before comitting myself to a dissertation project, I think I have a good idea, and that the proposal has some very good writing in it. I’m excited about improving it.
Failing in the statistical effort (or at least, suffering a setback), despite quite a bit of work, makes me wonder about the process for writing these kind of papers. Do people usually do most of the analysis, then go write up the theory? I feel like I needed to have done more of the analysis before I could really sit down and write the paper, yet the design for the study draws heavily on the literature. Perhaps if the dataset had not had such a paucity of variables for answering my questions it would have worked too.
For the moment, I’m working on the proposal. Have a regular writing schedule set up for this week to keep going on the other project (and a deadline for the statistics project which should help with the statistical analysis piece). I know where I’m trying to get to, just not sure of how yet. The only way to figure it out is to keep working.