Scary

So my advisor and I talked today about...gulp...my dissertation defense date. Actually, I'm really glad that we talked about it because it's good to keep an open communication about these things. I've heard too many horror stories of grad students who disagree with their advisor about when they should finish their degree and leave.

So, the tentative plan is for me to finish in August of 2007. That's only 20 months from now!! My fellowship support runs out that September, so it might be good to plan on being done around then anyway. I think that the department would give me support for a teaching position that fall (and even spring) if I have to postpone my defense, which is nice to know. So the tentative plan from now until the defense goes something like this:

Spring 2006: labwork, data analysis, writing, committee meeting, and planning for the summer
Summer 2006: fieldwork for my dissertation, conference(s)
Fall 2006: data analysis, writing, service for the department, and some modelling hopefully
Spring 2007: writing, writing, service, modelling, and contacting people about postdocs and maybe jobs
Summer 2007: many options! I'd love to attend the Santa Fe Institute complex systems summer school. However, I might decide to do more fieldwork (either out of necessity for my dissertation or to gather more data to write up later). I might also decide to try to get a position teaching a summer course for my department. Yay for teaching...I miss it greatly.

Now, this schedule might be optimistic, but at least my advisor and I are on the same page right now. He also told me today that he wasn't going to "push me out the door" -- I can decide to leave on my own time. I really appreciate that, and I'll just see how things go. I think the most scary part of all of this is that I'll probably need to start searching for postdoc positions and/or academic jobs in just a little over one year from now. Yikes!

Oh yes, part of my reasoning for writing all of this in my blog is to encourage you all to occasionally (and I mean rarely but more often than never) pester me about how well I'm keeping up with my own goals/schedule. :) I'll probably regret saying that, but oh well. :)