You’d think that the process of writing a proposal detailing the steps one will take to carry out a research study would make the actual act of carrying out said study a simple process of following the previously laid out steps. Or, at least, I did. And now that I’ve typed that sentence I realize how utterly ridiculous that was. It seems obvious to me now, a few weeks into data collection, that merely laying out a plan guarantees nothing. Why did I think any differently? Wishful thinking, maybe…or perhaps it’s the naivete of taking on a fairly large research study for the first time. Sure, I’ve coordinated research studies, but they were small. I’ve participated in large-scale evaluations, but they were the responsibility of someone else. This. This right here. It’s all mine.
Let me take a step back and tell you about my week. It’s Thursday, but it feels a bit like next Wednesday. That’s how long this week has been. The good news is that I have more than double the number of surveys than I did last week and I conducted my first interview with a very awesome, very talkative, and very knowledgeable teenager. Seriously, she was awesome and you should all be jealous that I got to talk to her this week. Just sayin’.
For the last few days, I’ve been trying to pull together some publicly available data to attach to the surveys. I have an abstract for a conference proposal due in a week and wanted to try and get some preliminary findings to write about. In my mind, this would take an afternoon. I’d sit down at my desk, find the publicly available data (or have one of the students I’m super lucky to have working with me find it), attach it to the surveys, run some stats and voila! Preliminary findings! We’ve already established that things like this don’t just happen, regardless of how well I may have laid out my plan for finding such data in my proposal.
I won’t go into all the annoying details, but let’s just say I underestimated Census data. It wins. Census: 546. Megan: 1 (population data is easy). There were other complications, but the Census data was the primary culprit. Today I met with one of my advisors (I’m lucky enough to have two and they’re both incredible). After a few minutes of feeling ridiculously stupid for asking questions I felt I should already know the answer to, I got over it and just asked for help. It went something like this:
Me: “I can’t find XYZ”
Advisor: “Here it is. Use this.”
Me: “I also can’t find this.”
Advisor: “It should be here. Oh, it’s not. Oh that’s okay. It’s right here. I’ll email this to you.”
Me: “Okay, but what about this.”
Advisor: “You’re right. That’s weird. Email these two people.”
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but that’s the general idea. I may have walked in the door feeling stupid but I didn’t walk out that way. Asking for help didn’t mean I couldn’t do it on my own…it just meant I didn’t have to. That’s why we have advisors. To advise us.
Maybe it hasn’t been such a bad week after all. Long, yes. Bad, no. After all, I’ve gotten nine new surveys completed, conducted an awesome interview, and figured out almost all of my public data problems…and it’s only Thursday.
Dissertating Under the Influence 