The Home Stretch

Here we go, the home stretch, the last 65 hours or so until the NCA submission deadline. I had a decent weekend as far as getting stuff done. There were a few things for my classes that I needed to finish off (lesson plans for today, for example), but I also made progress on most of the NCA things. The panel that I'm putting together is just about done--I need a statement from the chair saying that he'll attend the conference, but other than that, the panel's done. One of the papers is one rewrite away from being done. It just needs a little bit of polishing and a double-checking of the reference list. Today is packed with classes and meetings, so I'm hoping to knock that out Tuesday morning and get that paper and the panel submitted then. I didn't get quite as much done on the other paper as I would have liked. I need to finish the discussion section, substantially clean up and bolster the lit. review, and probably tweak the analyses a bit. And then rewrite and polish it. I've got most of the day Tuesday and a big chunk of the day Wednesday available. We'll see.

My thesis student (along with 2 others that I'm a committee member for) has realized that if he doesn't get everything together in a matter of days, he won't be able to defend in time to walk across the stage at Spring graduation. I'm not sure, but he may be working close to 24 hours a day. I doubt he will make it, but the problem is that I don't want to be the hang up. So I'm going to try to find a little bit of time Tuesday to read his results chapter and maybe some time Wednesday to go through his discussion chapter. Given his topic and results, I think the results chapter should be pretty easy, but I'm almost dreading the discussion chapter.

Two of the people in my department who are my internal reviewers for pre-tenure review are coming to my classes this week. One is coming today and one is coming Thursday. I spent some extra time on my lesson plans for today, but this is among my least favorite and consequently my least polished lesson of the semester. Please be nice.