Onward with the thesis.

Sorry for taking soo long to write, yet again. At this rate, I'm never going to get a consistent following. *sigh* Anyway, I promised an update regarding my thesis, so here it is!

I spent most of spring break and the majority of my waking hours last week preparing my thesis for proposal. At this point, this mostly meant formatting the whole thing, and writing my methodology (chapter 3). They tell you the methodology is super easy, I mean, it's only 3 pages. But I think this has been the hardest part of the project for me to date. This is mostly because I'm a little ahead of the curve, so a lot of the stats lingo (multiple regressions? convenience sample? ANOVA?) is way out of my league. However, I was finally able to meet with my methodologist, which was super helpful. He explained everything in a way that made total sense, and even reawakened my slumbering inner chemist (that's right. I have an inner chemist).

All this to say: I have proposed. Woohooo! I have yet to hear if my supervisor has approved it/sent it on to my committee, or if my committee approves, but it's a serious step in the right direction! I am way ahead of the game here, which is wonderful. Now it's just a waiting game, then I'll submit to the Institutional Review Board, to make sure I'm not harming people with my research and such.

So, to fill you all in on my research a bit. There's a big debate right now about this idea of the 'co-curriculum' or the 'intercurriculum' or whatever you choose to call it. Essentially, a lot of the literature says that "Man, things students do outside of class are super conducive to their learning overall." I wanted to do some quantitative research that is not self-report, that would give credibility to this statement. By being quantitative and not self-report, I'm able to avoid the whole "well, I think I learned a lot through these things" and actually look at the data for a statistical correlation. Do these things actually relate? I'm hopeful they do, but we'll see. :)

That's where I'm at. Just waitin' for my dearie, and happy am I...I mean, my approval. (Bonus points if you caught that reference...).

Thanks for tuning in. Life is good. Ready to be a monster with this last semester, and come home to finally get hitched!

Nat