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Okay, so it's been a while since I last blogged, but this semester has been a little rough. I'll just give a brief rundown of how it's gone. In January, after my dissertation chair forcing me to do years of revisions (6 chapters totaling roughly 300 pages were finished in draft for by August of 2005. In February of last year, I cut 2 chapters out of the dissertation realizing there was no way we were going to get through all of them in time before my 7 years ran out--still leaving me with slightly over 200 pages of material and no conclusion), I assumed it would be no problem to do what should have been minor revisions on the entire thing, write a conclusion, distribute it to my committee, defend by the March 26 deadline, and graduate this May. I assumed wrong, as usual.

So my chair decides immediately in January that the dissertation is nowhere near ready to be distributed to the rest of my committee--it just has horrid problems yet. How it still had such "horrid" problems was beyond me as each chapter had undergone, at minimum, 4 revisions with him before being passed to another committee member, under whom it had underwent just as many revisions i.e. the were done. Instead, he had spend all of January endlessly revising my Introduction. I must have gone through that one 25 page section at least 6 or 7 times before he decided it was "good enough." Now, despite the fact the introduction had already been published in a scholarly journal the previous fall, I had really started to doubt my own writing abilities. And you can imagine how draining it is endlessly revising the same material over and over and over, while still trying to teach a full-time class load consisting of 3 composition courses (writing intensive, so tons of papers) and 2 different literature classes.

In February, things only got worse. We finally moved on to Chapter One (yes, that left me with less than a month to get through the revisions on all four chapter and write a conclusion, as the entire dissertation needed to be distributed one month in advance of the defense). He spent all February sending me Chapter One as not good enough. It is a 40 page chapter. In one week, I revised the thing 4 times!!! I was exhausted. I was getting no sleep, I was falling behind on all the grading I had to do for work, I was miserable, and I was thinking I must be the worst writer ever! So then I got fried. You can only keep up that pace for so long, and, doubting my own abilities, I handed the whole manuscript over to a co-worker who did professional copyediting in his spare time. Imagine my surprise when, during the last week of February, he handed back the Introduction and Chapter One with MINIMAL comments. Every problem he found was something slight--nothing major. In fact, a good chunk of the problems he found were places my chair had taken the "liberty" of rewording himself.

So now what? It's the end of February, and it's obvious this man is not going to let me graduate. On top of that, I'm out of time: 7 years is up. This forces me to file for an extension, and, yet again, pay for another credit hour in the fall (you must maintain one credit hour every semester until you graduate). I was fried, so stressed I could hardly function, and I had had enough. My chair had been dragging his feet for two years--for two years I'd been trying to get help from the department with this situation. My area has had constant change, so I lost two committee members before I even moved 2 years ago and took a job. Thus, you can imagine, living 8 hours from your campus and no longer knowing anyone in the department makes it impossible to find new committee members on your own, much less a new chair when there is hardly anyone tenured in your area anymore. Pretty much, I got the run-around every time I approached the department for help, leaving me stuck with this chair. Well, now I was out of time and out of options. I also needed to stop working on the dissertation so I could catch up with all the papers I was behind on grading (roughly 200) and get those returned to the students.

In the middle of March, I lined up meetings with all my committee members, head people in the department and the dean of student affairs at my college, taking an entire week off to try and get this problem sorted. After meeting with the dean, I was informed that it was the department's responsibility to see that I got through the program once I was accepted, and, that once I my extension was approved, (he had talked to both the head of the department and the head of graduate students in our department) the department would be more than willing to help me reconfigure my committee and remove the chair. I left after that week of meetings finally feeling hopeful that something would go right, that I could finally finish this damn degree, and that someone was finally going to help me.

That was until this week. Last week I got the notification from the college that my extension was approved. I eagerly contacted the department, ready for any and all help finding a new chair and a new committee member to replace the chair I was removing. Monday, I received my response. The response, in summation, said, "You are responsible for finding a new chair and a new committee member. Once you do so and receive confirmation from them, simply fill out the proper forms, submit them, and forward the confirmation emails to me." THE END. So, basically, they just stuck me right back where I was a month ago--right back where I've been stuck the past few years. Only this time, not only do I have even more limited time since I am on an extension, not only am I still 8 hours away from campus, not only do I still not know anyone in the department, but also the semester ends in LESS THAN A WEEK!!! Less than a week and most of the faculty are gone for the summer, leaving no possible way to reform the committee at all.

Yes, this is more of a downer blog than normal. Right now, I'm trying to grade roughly 100 paper revisions before I get 60 response essays and 60 tests at the beginning of next week, while playing phone tag with the dean of student affairs.

Any volunteers to do my laundry? I might be running out of underwear about now too.