Welcome to my nightmare! Over the next year (God, I hope it’s only a year), I’ll be using this page to document in painstaking detail my efforts to write my dissertation, as well as my endeavors thwarting that objective. I envision this site as being part reference for other grad students, and part conventional personal blog (especially in the procrastinating-when-I-should-be-writing-my-dissertation sense).
About This Site
This site came about out of a newfound desire to record my witty (I think they’re witty) musings about all sorts of things I see and read. Then I thought it might be interesting to use a blog to record the adventures of a grad student in the throes of dissertation writing. Plus, I’ve recently found some killer time-wasters that should be shared with the much wider grad student community. So this space affords me the opportunity to do all that. Assuming I spend a healthy chunk of my procrastinating time updating this site.
About Me
I’m transitioning from the fourth to fifth year of graduate school, studying the history of East-Central Europe (think of all those non-Soviet Communist countries to get an idea of how I draw the boundaries of the region) at an institution that rhymes with “Luniversity of Mashington.” My fourth year has been spent overseas, primarily in Bratislava, Slovakia, with three months in Prague, Czech Republic, and assorted trips to other parts of the world, all thanks to the generosity of the U.S. Department of Education and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Since I’ve completed the lion’s share of my research (at least the overseas archival and library portion of it), I’ve begun the daunting process of trying to turn 15 GB of text, pictures and data into 300-400 pages of roughly polished potential book manuscript. Not knowing how to go about this process, I figured I should document my own foibles (like a half-decent historian) for the benefit of those who follow.
About Schmidt
About Schmidt was a somewhat sad, perplexing film with a disturbing hot tub scene featuring Kathy Bates and Jack Nicholson.
Aboot
a•boot [a-boot], preposition
[Origin: originally Canadian, used in low American English]
of; concerning; in regard to; often used erroneously to stereotype Canadian prairie speech: I don’t know what you’re talking aboot
