a submitted manuscript and developing diss ideas...

Wow, I haven't posted in a few weeks. But, it has been a productive few weeks!

Yesterday, Lynn (my advisor) and I submitted our manuscript (based on my master's study) for publication, at one of the field's top journals, Child Development. Horray! It has been a long time coming. We've been working on it on & off for 9 months, heavy duty for 3 months, and I had to recode some things to have the data we needed to make our argument. It is amazing how different the submitted paper is from my thesis. My thesis was about 90 pages, but the submitted paper is 35 and makes a much tighter argument. Lynn helped me a lot with ramping it up to C.D. quality, and I am so thankful for that. She should know too, because she's the editor of Child Development! It is an interesting process--since she is an author on the paper and therefore has a conflict of interest, she assigns an "action editor" to act on her behalf, and then has nothing to do with it after that. The action editor assigns reviewers, summarizes the reviews, does any correspondence with me, and ultimately makes a recommendation to reject or have us revise & resubmit it. Rarely are papers published as is. This whole process is so long! Whenever I get the reviews back, I will have to let Lynn know about it, she won't even know when I should get them!

Also, on Monday, I gave a talk at our developmental proseminar (with developmental faculty & grad students) on my dissertation ideas. It was fun. I was hardly nervous at all, because I haven't done the studies yet. At this point, if someone had brought up a really strong criticism, that would be great, because better now than after I've done the study! It was fun to talk about ideas, and I got lots of great feedback.

Today was also a fun day. I spent a few hours at one of my favorite bagel/coffee places, brainstorming dissertation ideas old-fashioned style with a legal pad and pen. It is becoming more clear to me, and this is one of the things I love about being a researcher--defining my passion, figuring out how to test it, thinking about why it's an interesting problem, etc. In a nutshell, I'm interested in when children take into account the audience of the person they are communicating to, via graphic symbols or notations. Before I go forth and do the study though, now is the time to think about how some tough theory questions about my ideas (e.g., how is this different than other studies that have looked at this same phenomenon with spoken or written language?) Lynn is really pushing me to do this, and I see why. I'm going to be stuck with this study for a long time, and I'd better make sure I have this well thought out first!

So, I'm having fun! This is one of those graduate school "up" times that are so crucial to getting through the tough times. :-)

P.S. leave a comment if you want me to e-mail you a copy of our paper! :-)