Putting it all together

I just finished putting everything together in one document for the first time. Kind of invigorating, but there's still a lot of work to do. I especially need to go through and clean up my APA styling. I also need to make sure all of my references are there and cited correctly. My biggest question is how to handle the tenses. I wrote the first three chapters in future tense because I hadn't done the study yet when I wrote them. Do I revise that to past tense now? I'm waiting to hear back from my chair on that. Maybe I'll ask my editor, too.

I'm also waiting to hear back from my chair on whether I can send out my results chapter to some of the people I interviewed for review. That chapter has the new model as well as three case studies that illustrate the constructs and their boundaries. One thing I said I would do in my prospectus was send those cases out for review by others in the field. So I need to get that done. I was supposed to do it a week ago, but with the major changes we made to the results section and the new model, I just wasn't ready. But I really need to send those out today and get quick feedback on them, so I hope I hear from my chair soon.

I also had the rug pulled out from under me a bit yesterday when one of my committee members suddenly announced that he will be out of the country June 20-30, which is exactly when I was planning to defend. Now I have to hope that my dean at UVU will allow me to defend on July 1st as my contract said I would have defende BY July 1st. Needless to say, I'm a bit anxious right now.

I'm really proud of and excited about what I've done here and hope everyone else will be, too. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is nice but also scary. To get my mind off of it, I'm going to go give a conference presentation about effective blogging in higher education. Fun for me!