Finally there

It is now as official as it gets: my defense will finally take place next week, with all the pomp and circumstance these things require in Finland, and particularly at the University of Helsinki. I have heard that elsewhere defenses may be pretty informal occasions, with no one else there but the prospective PhD and the examiners. I, on the other hand, will have an audience of a couple of dozen people at least, and the whole day is choreographed according to ancient customs from the beginning of the defense through the ceremonial dinner I will host in honour of my opponent in the evening. Everyone present will be dressed in white tie, or the feminine counterpart of that.

Maybe sometime later I will write a little post about tips how you can (mis-)use your position as a scholarly authority to obstruct the career path of dangerous younger generation researchers but now I am going to tune into a festive mood. Afterwards, there will be a party for various friends and colleagues, and I can finally let my hair down. Anyway, life is too short for academic rancour and personal vendettas.

I (almost) did it

Ending a long silence here.

I finally handed in my dissertation in the end of March. According to the Finnish system, it was then sent for so-called pre-examination for two external examiners. They will read my dissertation and comment it. After that I am to do corrections and additions according to the wishes of the examiners. Only after that I can apply for a permission to defend from the faculty. Since I have not got the comments yet, and I have loads of work for this autumn, my defense may not take place until early 2012. Such a long, slow process, and I have not even got the external examiners' comments yet.

No news is good news?

But now I have some. First, I'm in Jordan. Not for fieldwork this time - truth to be told I am not yet in any shape for that - but for delving in institute libraries and getting a good kick-start for finishing my dissertation. It seems to be working, too: I have only been here in ACOR for a day, and I've got more work done than I have for several months (not withstanding a congress presentation and an article on which I worked for most of August). 

Second, I have an update on the dissertation: Five chapters are in various stages of "nearly finished". Two chapters need a little more work than that but are basically there. One is missing a half but the structure is clear and it just needs to be written. I still have no clue of what the final chapter will handle, but otherwise things look bright.

Remind me of this optimism in December when my three-month finishing-off-the-dissertation grant is running out and I am fighting every night with the illustrations, missing references and miscellaneous corrections. 

Feeling optimistic

Things are looking up. If all goes well I will have only one treatment left. And my doctor gave me permission to travel in June! So I registered for the conference in Paris. I have even been slowly working towards producing a paper and have something more than a foggy idea of what to say. Now I am just restlessly waiting whether the university gives me a travel grant or not. Then there is also the matter of a cloud of volcanic ash over Europe, but maybe that will disperse by June?

I handed in one more chapter and according to my supervisor there is not very much work left with it. So now I have three almost-finished chapters for my dissertation. I realized that I might still be able to finish the whole thing by the end of this year! 

The date is set

And it is the 24th of May 2010. I know, that's next year. But let's not dwell upon that. I should hand in the first finished chapters after Epiphany. Now I'm trying to decide which ones would be even remotely possible - they are all in various stages of "unfinished", so preferably I should choose two which require the least amount of work to metamorphose into "finished".

Progress report

Almost four weeks into my four-month research grant and I have finally tied most (but not all) of the loose ends of the miscellaneous archaeology work I've done for living over the last year. I have also printed out the first version (more than hundred pages) of my dissertation to evaluate what needs to be done (a lot). And over the last week or so I have actually managed to immerse myself into the subject again. What is more, I feel I begin to have a grasp of the entirety of it. I hope I can continue in this positive vein.

In Jordan

The title says it all, really. We are doing a couple of weeks trip to Petra for additional documentation and photos in publication purposes. Ramadan ended just a couple of days ago and the eid festivities are still in full go. I am writing this in one of the ACOR guest rooms, listening to the habibi music carried in through the open window by the night wind (by the sound of it there might be a pop concert somewhere nearby). The day after tomorrow we will head for Petra.

I have had a lot in my mind recently, trying to tie loose ends so that I can start my dissertation grant in October without having them hanging around. Need I say I did not manage to tie them all? There are still a couple of research reports needing the final touch, and one abstract has to be written. Still, I did a pretty good job of it. I'm hoping this short field season in the landscapes of Petra provides the much-needed kick start for finishing the dissertation work for good.

What I did in May

Good news have been cropping up lately:
- my article will be published, after all (my first ever publication in an international refereed journal)
- my paper was accepted for next year's ICAANE in London
- I got a four-month grant for writing my dissertation which means it might eventually be completed

The course in archaeological survey is almost over, the students just need to hand in the final assignments on post-fieldwork. As always, the course was an educational experience for myself in how not to do things. The course could have been better; I suppose it could have been worse. I have learned my lessons and will no doubt do different mistakes next year.

It was also an interesting glimpse into the undergraduate psyche and the pressures today's students are under. Back in the good old days when I was a student you had a certain number of months we were entitled to study grants, and how you used that time was your own business. If you used up the money before graduating, well, that was just too bad. Since then the Study Grants Board has become interested in the progress of your studies. You have to prove that you have been studying diligently, and the only way of proving that is, of course, getting enough credits. The close supervision of credits earned seems to have created a situation where the credits themselves are the end, and not the means to an end. The students do not study to learn anything, they study to get the credits.

The same system that works on the level of an individual student, works also between the Minitry of Education and the universities. The Ministry, which hands out the money for the universities, requires universities to produce a certain number of degrees yearly to get the funds to run their teaching and research. Of course the requirements rise every year without similar input into resources. The universities are effectively treated as if they were factories producing rubber boots for the left foot only. Every year the factories are required to produce more boots out of the same amount of rubber. And they say hey, you can do that if you cut the amount of raw material per boot. The boots won't last any wear, but who cares, as long as the statistics look nice - the end product is useless without the right foot boot anyway.

Back in the business

I finally submitted the revised version of the article. This editing process has been a very interesting lesson in academic publishing. And I swear that article is cursed, because everything went wrong with it, repeatedly, right down to when I finally sent the text and the - ahem - quite large illustration files. One of which ended in some kind of a loop somewhere in the ether and kept bouncing into the mailbox of a certain respectable and very soon - understandably - extremely annoyed person. I hope it has stopped doing that by now. And now let's not talk about it anymore. Ever.

Incidentally, I've decided to write a monograph after all.

This is also an explanation for my long silence. It is not that I ran out of things to rant about. I was just too busy with everything else. I made some notes though, and might return to some of the subjects if irritated enough. There are also plans for this year, besides finishing my dissertation, of course. You'll hear more about those in due time.

Hooray!

My article has been accepted for publication!

Of course I will have to do some editing, but still, this feels like a small victory. And it gives me some hope that maybe, after all, I will get my PhD one day, although not necessarily as soon as I would have wished (if you read my profile carefully you may notice a small but significant change). Oh well, as a past Finnish president said, one has to acknowledge realities.

Back at the office

After two weeks of fieldwork it is a strange experience to be back at the office. Neither has my right hand fully recovered from the experience - digging clayey soil is hard work, even with a spade. But the weather was fine (almost too fine, as fieldwalking would probably have been more fruitful after a little bit of rain), the company was good, and it was great to be outdoors. For me it was also a useful re-training course of doing archaeological work in Finland. And as a result, this is going to be a brief spell at the computer before one more week of fieldwork!

Needless to say, all this means that my dissertation is sadly neglected...

Everyday nuisances and annoyances

Guess what had happened when I came to work today. Windows had somehow reset its settings over the weekend and all my email settings and bookmarks had miraculously disappeared. Again. The last time this happened was after the Christmas vacation. After that I installed a handy add-on to Firefox for copying my bookmarks to the internet. Naturally that was also gone, and guess if I remember where to find those bookmarks now. Annoyance would be a mild term to describe my state of mind. After all, the internet is a major tool these days, and my bookmarks did actually contain relevant stuff for my research. Having to set up my email account again was a minor nuisance compared to the loss of bookmarks. It seems that I'll just have to start copying my bookmark file to a safe place at least once a week to avoid this happening every couple of months.

On the subject of the state of my dissertation: After receiving a note telling they had got my article, I have not heard anything from the journal. I hope that it is a good sign and means they have decided to give it to the referees.

I am working on the next article, one dealing with - not surprisingly - landscapes. Soon I should brace myself and hand it to my supervisor for comments. Btw, I heard that a very early and incoherent version of it, which I had subjected to peer-critique at the post-grad seminar, had been circulating at the NBA. Am very embarrassed. Now I begin to see why others only hand out almost finished articles.

Article angst I

Gaah, I've offered an article for publication - the first ever I hope to get published in an international refereed journal and now I am waiting for the decision of the editors. It's SCARY folks, it's scary. I read the names of the editors and those of the editorial board and ran across several BIG names. And I am aspiring to publish in the company of those people? I feel so inadequate. Well, the rejection will be easier to bear because I'm expecting it, I suppose.

I think the whole business of my dissertation would have taken a lot less of time had I not this tendency to lapse into extreme self-deprecation which may lead to total lack of initiative and even complete apathy from time to time. To tell the truth, more than once I've considered giving up altogether and forgetting all dreams of a career in archaeology because I feel I am not intelligent enough to do this, and only been pushed to go on by the fact that research funding has been my only source of income. Why can't I be a happy-go-lucky person who believes in their own abilities for more than a few hours in a go?