Gut-of-van

It's night, and I've been spending the better part of evenings this week doing more carpool research- now that I've discovered online delivery of print journals from the school library- I just have to give the citation of the article I want. If the library subscribes to that journal/issue, they scan it into PDF If they don't own it, they sent the request to whoever owns it, and then they scan it and post it for me to download.

Kind of obvious, and yet pretty cool- they actually walk over, get the book, scan it, and email it so I don't have to do it myself.

Of course, some of the old stuff doesn't OCR well, hence the title that was meant to say "out-of-van", but it still describes riding in the middle of a vanpool, and somehow "gut of van" seems accurate enough and yet provides an interesting image- or would be interesting if you'd been spending hundreds of hours rereading transportation literature over the summer. It's also interesting that the one article contains the only occurrence of that phrase in all of Google. Or will so until I hit the "Publish Post" button, at any rate.

At the moment, I'm at a complete loss about how to write the methodology section of my proposal. I'm just making vague comments about the population- I greatly prefer to know where I'm heading with it. Maybe this is par for the course with a dissertation proposal, I don't know, but I have a gut feeling I should have a clear methodology discussing my hybrid network of public bus routes, carpools, and vanpools for student commuters.

Maybe a gut-of-van feeling...

Method for the madness

I'm on the methodology section of my proposal now, trying to review group processes that range from focus groups to group interviews. I've got a fresh stack of books and articles to read through (or at least a virtual stack).
It feels like square 1.

Milestone - literature review

I finished my first draft of a literature review for my dissertation proposal. It's a small milestone, but still a milestone in the dissertation process. I've counted 45 references, hastily, all managed with the Zotero program I'm testing. I'm pretty happy with it.
Or will be until the thing blows up and eats my dissertation. I'm making lots of backups, mostly on Google, which in turn could always go out of business and eat my dissertation. But you do what you can.
I haven't even addressed every possible point, or cited every work I could have- just the main ones. There is, after all, a full dissertation to write after the proposal, and until hearing otherwise, there's no need to burn through everything for the proposal. I'm aiming for the beginning of Fall semester, since the summer is now out of the question for a proposal defense.
But I still have a methodology to write and other structural material such as a proposed outline of dissertation chapters.
Now ask me what I had just written and submitted, and my brain would be a complete blank. I think I'll have to resume the next section tomorrow. But I think it had something to do with carpooling, and college students, and the likelihood that student attrition rates were partly related to misunderstandings about commuting costs that made ongoing attendance unaffordable. Or something like that.