Monday, September 17, 2007

And the Storm Blows Up in Her Eyes

It's on. The job market's hit me, and I already feel like I'm running just keep up.

One thing is postdoc applications. Some of them have retardedly early deadlines. Last year, I blew the deadlines and I had to tell my supervisor, the Professor, I couldn't apply for postdocs he'd explicitly told me to apply for. That was humiliating, and I wanted to make damn sure I didn't fuck that up again this year.

Well, I might have already fucked it up. One of my letter writers wants to see what progress I've made on my dissertation since he wrote me a letter last year. The thing is, I've only got one new chapter more or less drafted. And I've thrown out another chapter I had last year, so it's a fucking wash. Now, I have made progress--I have a draft of another new chapter in the works, but it's a mess right now and not fit for my committee's eyes, and I have fairly detailed plans for another two chapters. But big plans and pieces of drafts aren't a dissertation, so it sort of looks like I've spent the year fucking off.

My cunning plan was to promise this guy a detailed abstract, so he could get a sense of the shape of the whole dissertation, and to promise I'd have it for him in two days. So now my head's down and I'm writing like a motherfucker, in between sending panicked e-mails to my committee about deadlines for their updated letters.

More later on those panicked e-mails and just how well and truly fucked I am.

1 comment:

Himself said...

Are these postdocs you mention with early deadlines not advertised in JFP (because I haven't seen them - unless our definitions of 'ridiculously early' are different)?