Project Self: Carrying Meaning

I've realized that my chosen career path allows me a privilege that many others do not have. I have the opportunity to do projects that really mean something to me. And in a typical academic career, the project that sets the tone for the first few years is the dissertation. Often the dissertation is the only work that ever gets published. And it is clearly the project on which you make a name for yourself. Underneath it all, I've held on to a need to do work that I think is socially relevant. After all, if I have the power to choose the theoretical basis as well as the context in which it is used, then I would be rather wasteful if I didn't find a way to do work that is socially relevant. As a result, for the last few months, I've been wrestling with what I wanted to do for my dissertation.

My research is on decision making and problem solving at the individual level. And what I'm interested in is how people get good at this, or, to put it another way, how expertise develops. There's a lot of research that tells about how people who have low functional literacy can't do things, but very little research tells us what these folks can do. And I believe that there is enough variance in the different domains of life such that there will be different paths in the development of expertise. I'm not sure, but my guess is that relatively little education is required to develop expertise in domains where experiential (as opposed to theoretical) learning is dominant.

I'm envisioning some cool studies where people try to solve puzzles with different types of learning as the variable. Instead of the typical surveys and questionnaires, we'll have actual behavioral observations. Now, the design of these studies is something that I haven't figured out, yet. So there's still work to be done.

Anyway, I believe that the current thought is that I'll have the front end of my dissertation taken care of, leading up to my proposal defense, by the end of the spring semester, ideally by April 15. Which puts me in a good position to have a reasonably relaxing summer, hopefully teach during one of the sessions, and design a few studies that I'll pretest on my students and have ready to roll in the fall. Of course, this also means that this summer, I'm sending out my packets and starting the whole interview process to get the ball rolling on getting a position locked up next fall so that I'll have a job the following fall. Strange, isn't it?

Anyway, the current plans are to knock out a bunch of small tasks tonight and tomorrow, to collect data this week and next week, and hopefully wrap up all of the data collection on a project. For break, all I'm planning on is chilling out as the only things that I'll be doing are watching sports, playing video games, honing my skills in the kitchen, buying some odds and ends for the apartment, hitting the gym, and starting up on the dissertation. I'll probably hit up Cincy to catch the Xavier-Illinois game w/ Mick, and I'll try to hit up St. Louis for the Braggin' Right game, if they ever let us know about tickets. But the work should be minimal, which I'm definitely looking forward to.

-Chairman