Post #7: The Cold Numbing the Fingers that Type a Thesis

My goal over winter break is to read the sources recommended to me by my secondary advisor, Professor Casey from the Anthropology department. She provided me with a lot of sociological/anthropological sources, some of which couldn't make it into my lit review, but I will start reading them over the break. I will still be volunteering at the Air and Space Museum from Wednesdays through Saturdays, so that leaves the rest of the week to do reading. I plan to count all the articles, and then budget how many to finish each week. I'll be taking notes as I go, so hopefully, by the time Spring semester starts, I'll have a rough outline of talking points for my thesis. This will also help me compile a list of focused questions for my advisors and Dr. Lent.

Getting ready for winter break

Instead of wasting my days with Netflix, I hope to be very productive over this winter break!

I have several goals that I hope to accomplish before the end of the break. First, I want to polish off my literature review. I want to add a few more sources that I couldn’t include because I ran out of time, and I’m sure that I will have a lot of feedback to work with after the museum studies faculty review my thesis proposal (yikes!!). Secondly, I would like to schedule a meeting with my thesis advisers so I can make sure I have a good plan of action to complete my thesis and begin a more in-depth outline for the rest of my paper. Hopefully, I can bribe them with coffee so they will meet with me before the semester starts! 

The largest goal I hope to accomplish over break is completing all of the elements of my app. My partner Peter and I already have a timeline in place, and thus far we’ve been meeting all of our goals, so I don’t see this being an issue.

Thankfully, I will be working on campus over the break, so I plan to spend at least an hour on campus doing work after I finish my shift. Once I’m in work-mode it’s easier to keep the ball rolling, so I think that this will end up working really well for me. I get out of work in the early afternoon and could easily be home before 5pm every day even after staying to work on my thesis. I also set personal deadlines for myself and use a daily planner, so that organization should help me keep on track and put me in a good place to start the spring semester. 

It’s hard to believe I’m essentially halfway finished with my thesis. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time!

A Glance Back and a Short Look Forward

Well, this is it.  The end of my first semester of thesis work.  It seems like only yesterday that I was struggling to sort through all of my potential thesis ideas, yet here I am today, with my initial proposal submitted for feedback, writing my final post of the semester (and of 2017, I suppose).  While I have accomplished a lot over the course of the semester, my work on this project is far from finished and a good deal of it will have to be accomplished over the upcoming winter break.  This will include conducting interviews with members of the RMSC’s staff and local Native communities, before performing at least one (although it will probably end up being several) thorough survey of the Rochester Museum and Science Center’s (RMSC) Native Peoples of the Americas exhibit, with what I have been told in the interviews in mind (I already completed an initial, cursory survey over Thanksgiving Break).  I will also use this time, and the resources that have been provided to me by Kathryn Murano, Senior Director for Collections and Exhibits at the RMSC, to take a more focused look at the history of Native American collections and representation at the RMSC, in order to better understand how this exhibit fits with its fellows across the nation (as briefly outlined in my most current draft of my literature review).

With regards to finding the time to work on all of this, I will, of course, have to work my interviews and exhibit surveys around the various winter holidays that are coming up, and I have a strong suspicion that, in some cases, I will have to wait until at least just after New Year’s to make any major headway with regards to interviews.  Thankfully, I will be fairly flexible in my ability to take time to interview people, as I will be staying in Rochester for the entire break and have a semi-flexible work schedule during that time.  Because of this, I am not worried about setting a schedule for my thesis work at this time, as it will be easier to work around other people’s schedules than my own.

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who has helped me with this process and my project thus far, including Dr. Tamar Carroll, Kathryn Murano, and Dr. Juilee Decker, and wish everyone happy holidays.

While many of the photographs from my recent survey of the Native Peoples of the Americas exhibit turned out very dark due to the low lighting in the exhibit, my friend Skye Tryon did take this picture of me at the RMSC with a taxidermied pangolin, an endangered African and Asian mammal similar to an armored ant eater.  The pangolin is part of The Science of Ripley's Believe It or Not!® exhibit, which is on display at the RMSC until January 2, 2018.