September 19th

September 19th, 2010

Tomorrow I have to present my first year project, which for those of you familiar with the Ed Psych program at the University of Wisconsin is a self explanatory statement... but for others might need some explaining.

Wisconson is what is called an R1 school. This means that research is the primary focus. In my area research is kind of always the primary focus, but the focus of the school determines the structure of the program. Our PhD program is an apprenticship model. We take classes to learn theory but the most important thing we learn is how to be a researcher, something that doesn't necessarily happen in class.

We have 4 major milestones in our PhD path. First is the First Year Project. Its purpose is to show that you can do research. We all need to present a poster in the fall after sucessful completion of our first year. If we don't have any of our own research to present at this point we might have a problem (there are plenty of valid reasons why people present thier first year project at the end of thier second year... but it is kind of a temperature taker for how things are going and if the program is a good fit, so it is discouraged). The first year project isn't defended or necessarily evaluated formally.

Next is the Master's Thesis. The nature of this varies by area. In my area it is called a MAP (Major Area Paper), and it really just a paper written from a research project that we did. There are some guidelines about how much help we can get, and what we can and can't get help on. We don't have to defend our proposal, and we don't have a formal defense for our paper, but we do have a committee that signs off on it. We are encouraged to write it so that it is the appropriate length for publication. Which is nice, because publication guidelines are often shorter than the average thesis.

Once our MAP is accepted by our committee we are officially admitted as PhD candidates and awarded a masters.

Then we do our prelims. They are essentially a lit review that will form the backbone of our dissertation. We have to go into a "cone of silence" where we don't talk to our peers, or anyone else really, about our topic and we have 8 weeks to write. We have to get approval in advance on our outline and question, and then have a formal defense.

When the prelim defense is final we are dissertators. We have a dissertation committee, we have a proposal that gets accepted then we write then we defend. Then we are done!

All that to say, tomorrow I present my poster for my first year proejct. It feels significant and fancy. The boys helped me to get my poster printed up, and we hung it in my office to dry and flatten over night. They were very excited to help carry it.

I had hoped to complete another research project that I am working on in time for tomorrow, but research always takes longer than we think it will, and so I am presenting some work that I finished last may. Even though the work on the poster can never be published or taken to a conference (I wasn't able to get approval from the research reveiw board (irb) due to some small complications), it is my work and it is exciting to see it on a poster.

It makes me excited to move forward on the two research projects I am working on now. One is just for a conference (that happens to be in Hong Kong, fingers crossed that it gets accepted) and the other is for my MAP. I can't wait to see that work up on a pretty poster, or even better in print in a journal or conference proceedings!