Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

A South African private security team in India on business were in the wrong place at the right time.  Can’t vouch for all the details but the story has been covered in MSM.

The story, from a South African news portal, says that the security team was on the 25th floor of the hotel when they heard gunshots. They moved the other guests into the kitchen, barricaded themselves in, and armed themselves with what they could: knives and meat cleavers. When they knew the fires were spreading, they decided to make a move.  Faisul Nagel, one of the team, contacted the security manager of the hotel to warn the police of their plan. They moved everyone down a fire exit on the back of the hotel, 25 flights, including a 90-year old grandmother who had to be carried the whole way on a chair.

I’ve tackled this “heart of the beast” by dividing it into 3 chapters – one for each hypothesis. I may end up bringing them back into one chapter — not a problem really. I have a week and a half left until it’s due.

Went into Widener at 9:15 this morning. Sat in the reading room on the 2nd floor.  A handful of us worked in utter silence. It was fine! People filtered in a bit over next three hours. It’s so much easier to focus at the library than it is in my office at home. I try to get to the library when I need quiet and no interruptions. (Sidenote: none of us in the room had any books with us, nor were we pulling books off the shelves. We all had laptops and our materials were on our computers. As an older student who remembers card catalogs, that was an interesting observation.  It also occurred to me that this is the last year I’ll be in Widener. Won’t be a student next fall.)

It’s kind of a steady hum lately. Writing, thinking, writing. I have a good rhythm going now. I find getting back into the material is easy when I’m wading through it daily. I’m in the flow.

Took a break over the Thanksgiving holiday. Put all that thesis work aside for two days. Very nice. However, tomorrow will be a mix of activities: get the Christmas tree in the morning (store it in the garage in water for a week), work on the thesis, then go to a wake in the late afternoon (a friend’s Mom died Wednesday). This is one major difference between me as an older student and young (20-something) students I’ve met at Harvard. For people my age, it’s not unusual that some relatives and friends have died. It is still a bit of a mind-bender to think about graduating at an age when my parents’ generation was nearing retirement. This is how much the baby boomers have shifted the thinking about age. And about retirement. With so many of us living longer, 50 ain’t as old as it used to be.

Another movie distraction and recommendation: The Dish with Sam Neill and Patrick Warburton. Based on the true story of the Australian radio telescope and crew that broadcast some of the first images from Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, July 20, 1969.

Good cast, well-written, nicely acted. Both funny and touching. Reminds me a bit of State and Main. In high school at the time of the moon landing, I remember it well and appreciated the intermixing of real footage and audio.

I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking as my solution to elbow and wrist tendonitis. The problem is Dragon is a nightmare. I used to love it when it worked but it’s so glitchy that those moments of bliss are rare. It hangs up when I have a pdf open too long (”document is not tagged…” baloney), it won’t capitalize (it puts completely different words in and won’t cap no matter how hard I try), it begins putting each word in caps out of the blue, it arbitrarily starts putting extra spaces between each word as if it’s “right justified” but it’s not. I’ve got Dragon 9.0 on my Dell Inspiron and have used it for a couple of years off and on. Then I got a Dell Vostro and put Dragon 10 on it. Problem is: Dragon 10 goes with the Word 2007 program I loaded but it turns out I find Word 2003 is just simpler and easier. I’d actually have to learn Word 2007 (there are way too many choices and finding simple, quick commands is a chore until you learn where/how everything is).

Don’t get me started on the ultimate hassle of “dictating into a non-standard window”. That happens randomly.

Even when I shut the program down (not a good sign if it doesn’t ask you if you’d like to update your program before it quits) and reboot it, that doesn’t mean it found its brains again. Sometimes the reboot is just as retarded as the first try.

For such a powerful program, it fall so short.

Did I mention that tech support is “fee-based”, even the first call? All I can say is that the tres expensive legal and medical version must be less buggy. If they are as unpredictable and frustrating as the Professional version, the staff assistants who use them would be bald.

I heard the news today. Oh boy : (

I was in the Wellesley Booksmith when a salesclerk announced it to a few people at the counter. One of the customers said “that’s the end of Harvard Square…now it will just be like a lot of other places”.

I agree with her. Old, locally-owned stores have been closing too often in recent years around Harvard Square.  Each of those stores was one element of the tapestry that made the Square a community. Out of Town is the place to go to find a far-flung paper or magazine.  It just is Harvard Square. The aggressive rehabbing of the Square has brought in homogenized retail chain stores at the expense of the local places. The new stores are about the money, not the community. It’s kind of soul-less.

Good news is that the Harvard Bookstore didn’t go down that road. The new owner has been a customer for years and intends to keep the local flavor, the focus on the quality of the book-lover’s experience, and sense of community.

My family was in the retail community store business for two generations and customer service was  everything.  My father and grandfather knew all their customers. The regulars had their own in-store credit accounts. The stores were part of the fabric of the community and local charities could count on them for support as well.  In my town, there are two stores that come to mind that fit that bill. Both are family businesses. The sales clerks like their work; they care about customer satisfaction and repeat business. They understand the importance of “meeting and greeting” and chatting you up at the register; and, the staff has the social skills to do those things. Spending time in those shops is the complete opposite experience of the sterile, often annoying and anti-social experience at a CVS.

So something important will be lost when Out of Town closes in January. I expect they’ll have an uptick in business in December as many people will want to be in there one last time before its too late.

Went to the Social Sciences thesis writers group last night. About 15 people there.  Some observations:

1. over the last two years, when I’ve attended, there were always a few students in the midst of actually writing their thesis. Most of the participants, however, were at other stages of the process: just thinking about ideas or working on their proposal. Each year I moved deeper into the process. Two years ago, I had my main topic: private security contractors but no “angle”. Last fall, I was figuring out my focus, my question. Last spring, I was finishing my proposal. Last night, I reported  things have moved along nicely (happily) — I have handed in two chapters and am working on the Results and Findings chapter (due in December). Each year, there were a couple of students, different faces each year, who were well into the thesis writing and then they graduated so you no longer saw them at the group.

So I could see this progression. Last night, it was clear to me, felt good too,  I was the vanguard for this year. I’m one of a handful of people who are deep into it and will be graduating in June. Hearing others around the table talk about the status on their efforts, I remembered listening to those ahead of me last year, like Curtis and Nadia, and wondering if I was going to get where they were.

2. The wide range of ideas at the table. I’m always amazed at how diverse the govt. and history topics are.

3. At every meeting I’ve been to in three years, there are always a few folks off in the weeds. Students who are overly-enamored with their subject but not good at boiling it down to a specific inquiry. Perhaps they’re not really interested in boiling it down — some people like hanging out in the weeds. That’s fine but not if you really want to graduate. (and I’m well aware some folks don’t want to but that’s another post).

4. Those enamored with their subject often take too much air time! Dr. O. is not a highly-directive group facilitator : (     Unfortunately, this translates into some students having much less time (or none) to talk about their work.

5. One technical tip: CMS does not offer much direction in the way of citing a variety of government documents. Don reminded us that you need to cite fully but regardless of how you cite something, be consistent throughout the paper. The point of a footnote (or endnote) is that someone reading your work can find your references.

6. In the “technical” portion of the evening, Don noted that the ALM Manual was written with a typewriter in mind.  Think about this for a minute. The latest edition is 2003.  The thesis is supposed to look as if it were done on a typewriter? That’s just weird in 2008. It was weird in 2003. It would have been odd in 1998! Update the ALM Manual.

7. And last but not least, in the very good news category, Don said that the ALM office will be working to make the theses available online so anyone can access them (next best thing to being in ProQuest/ABI) and a thousand times better than just being in print in Grossman! I think Ian Lamont will be very happy to hear this. He graduated last year and advocated for this for some time.

Last night was the Center’s annual fundraiser. About 500 people at the Seaport Hotel in Boston. This is our fourth year of being involved with the Center (just changed its name from “shelter” to “center”). They do great work over there. Had a tour of the facility couple of years ago. The President, Larry Fitzmaurice, is a friend.  I’m hoping they get more publicity. Given the American support for the troops, it would be good to see that support translate into real dollars and action; the Center is one place to help. They are seeing an increase in PTSD from Iraq and Afghanistan vets.

Secretary James Peake, Veterans Affairs, was the keynote speaker. He quoted the stat that about 150,000 vets are homeless at any given time. Maybe double that amount; it’s hard to get accurate data. John Altenburg, an old friend, introduced him.

The benefit also has an auction – they had a framed, signed photo of Celtics’ greats that any hard-core Celts fan would want. The Seaport has been a big supporter and always throws in extras on the event and its auction items.  Color Guard opens and closes the dinner. The Center gives an award to a graduate of the Center’s training programs. It’s a moving tribute and reminds us that soldiers deserve support beyond yellow ribbons.

P.S. IAVA just posted on this topic.

As I work my way into the “Results & Findings” chapter, I’ve been reading over various theses and dissertations in the ABI/ProQuest database.  I have also gone over several of the ALM theses in Grossman. From this informal survey, I am beginning to form an opinion on format options. There seem to be two basic choices: the traditional format (apparently typical in education and the sciences) which clearly shows where certain information is regardless of your topic.  This looks like

I.  Introduction

II.  Background

III.  Literature review

IV.  Methodology

V.  Results and Findings

VI.  Conclusion

Chapter V, Results and Findings, can actually be broken out into separate chapters based on your hypotheses; and, it can also include the discussion of the results which is the analysis and interpretation or the discussion can be a separate chapter.

The other option which is much more common and certainly is prevalent in political science involves naming the chapters based on your subject matter. Reading through these is a real slog because it’s not obvious in the Table of Contents where the Results, Findings, or Discussion sections are. Many of these theses and dissertations do not even have separate background or literature review chapters.  Making matters worse, more than a few of these were “hybrid” theses — meaning they included both quantitative and qualitative research.

My efforts to find a couple of good Results Chapter “templates” or models for my singular case study based on qualitative research and process tracing were not particularly fruitful! Frankly, some of the ALM’s were (and I know I’ve said this before) just long papers that could’ve been written for a class.  For instance, no methodology chapter, just one or two pages for the introduction with a sentence or two about methodology, and no lit review.  Also, quite a few of these had only one hypothesis; so the reader doesn’t see what some of the alternatives were, especially if the author did not include a discussion of “counter-arguments” or “alternate explanations” in the results/discussion chapter.

As one of my fellow ALM students said last year, “not all ALM theses are on the same playing field”.

My thesis director sent comments via email today on my first two chapters. The good news is she likes my work. Only minor revisions. She made specific suggestions so I’m sure my second submission will be fine. It feels great to get “calibrated” – until the director returns your first submission, you don’t know how it will go. Now, I am confident we will work together well; there won’t be any “slash and burn” critiques.

The Background Chapter was the easier of the two to compose. The Lit. Review has always been the “beast”. I’m good at finding appropriate material and summarizing – which is often enough for some directors. But a stirling review includes synthesis. For my topic, private security in Iraq, there wasn’t any scholarship on my particular argument so I couldn’t do a narrow review that only addressed that literature. My director asked me to broaden the review and look at the interagency process, public-private partnerships, and private contracting in recent U.S. military operations. Each became a sub-heading in my lit. review chapter. She also wanted me to write about military strategy but I realized that was too broad so I got her approval to switch it to military doctrine and regs on contracting.  Not only did I review academic scholarship but I included Congressional testimony and pertinent reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), GAO, and think tanks.

In August, a Cornell Ph.D. published her dissertation which had a chapter on my topic so I focused on that in the lit. review, in terms of scholarship. She’s the only other academic researching my particular topic. (There are plenty of others who research private military but not this specific question). This is one of the realities of doing a thesis/diss. — you can be well into it and “suddenly” someone pops up who’s also in your domain. You wouldn’t know about the other work unless it was published, you kept checking certain sources, or you heard about it from a conference. She and I have picked a subject which is hard to gather data on and only just began happening in OIF. That’s why there’s no one else doing it yet.

When you look over the ABI/ProQuest database of theses and dissertations, it becomes apparent that there is no one way to do this product. Even some dissertations don’t have a lit. review chapter. Some theses are just long papers. So it’s important to be clear with your director what style she expects. The vehicle is the outline. I can’t imagine doing a thesis without one.

Currently, I’m working on the Results and Findings Chapter — the heart of the thesis. It will incude analysis and interpretation. It’s due in early December. There’s a separate Conclusion Chapter. The whole first draft is due by Jan. 15 which should be doable.

More about the trek into the Results effort next time.

One Giant Leap for Mankind