Hard Work DOES Pay Off...

This has been the hardest year of my life to date. School is becoming increasingly more difficult with the pressures it brings and work is always a complicated finessing of different personalities. BUT there is a glimpse of sunight! I knew that a paper I wrote had been accepted competitively at The Eastern Communication Association's annual conference. Today it feels official since I now have a date and time. I'll be trecking down to Baltimore in April to present my paper entitled "An Exploration of Why People Participate in Second Life Social Support Groups". (You can download the program...I'm on page 17)!

Truthfully I'm overwhelmed and overtired which results in a deadly combination of inappropriate emotions... but it feels like all the hours and all the sacrifices I've made to get here are all worth it. It still doesn't seem perfect and I will always feel like I should be spending more time on school work and with friends and family. But I've decided to take the advice my rhetoric professor gave our class in regards to feeling like we should be online discussing and commenting on our ning site all the time ... I have to make decisions on what time each thing in my life deserves and realize that I will probably feel like I'm not giving enough time to anything. Unfortunately I think she's right. I'd like to think that someday I'll feel as though things are in balance but it just isn't looking like that will happen in the near future. Maybe never.

But today I'm going to let that all go and revel in the fact that I have a date and time! And that I got an email from my Mom telling me that she and my father are proud of me :) A girl can't hear that enough....

Thank You World For Your Concern

I have to admit that I think I can do it all and do it well. My founding principal is that anything is possible as long as you try hard enough. So, that being said it is upsetting that it appears that people question my ability to do it! I'll admit, full time work and grad school is hard. I miss doing things with friends and spend not nearly enough time watching tv and relaxing, but the hard work is worth it. I love school and I like doing the reading and writing that it requires. I think I'm good at it. But as is the case with most things in my life, I tend to go overboard. I'm not content with just getting my degree...I need to have an A average. I need to publish, go to conferences and graduate in the shortest time possible, at least in my mind.

Clearly this would put stress in anyone's life, especially for someone with a hard core type A personality. And it appears that others are noticing that I may be under a little bit of pressure right now. I've gotten the are you okay? You're quiet and not acting like yourself. To which I answer, I'm fine...just got a lot going on that's all. Unfortunately that wasn't sufficient for some people. They decided that my weight is now a problem. Apparently in their eyes I don't weigh enough. Now, I'll admit I'm not a stress eater. If I were then I'd be the girl reading journal articles while the forklift came to get me out of my house. Instead, I tend to not want to eat if I've got a lot on my mind. This inevitably leads to weight loss. I probably went down 2 sizes over the summer and quite frankly I didn't think it was even noticeable to the outside world. But apparently it is. As of now I've had not one, but two coworkers comment on my weight. No one would bother me if I put on a few pounds....but loose some and your fair game.

Perhaps others wouldn't be bothered by this. I'm within my BMI range, albeit on the low side. I'm a healthy person. What is most upsetting is not that they think my body isn't right...it's that it implies that I'm unable to handle what I'm doing. People suggest that I cut back on classes saying "what's one more semester". Well, one more semester is significant in my eyes and will not be happening. Perhaps for someone not as type A as myself, this would just roll off their back. Perhaps I need to be more that way, but if I were then the motivation to get me through school could perhaps fade as well. Maybe lack of sleep is making this all the more upsetting. Maybe a good night sleep would make the world seem so much more in line and everything would be perfect. But I'll never know because until August, a good night sleep is simply unobtainable.

In the meantime, maybe all concerned individuals will join togather and invite Jeff VanVonderen over so they can tell me how my problems have influenced their lives in the following ways.....

Now that I would take an afternoon off from studying for!

And the Research Goes On...

Blogging has taken a back seat to the infinite amount of time that I've spent in Second Life conducting interviews and sitting in on support group meetings! My nights have revolved around when a group was meeting and how many people I could conceivably talk to after the meeting to answer questions about their thoughts on what they get out of support group meetings in SL. Thankfully I can now see a glimps of the light at the end of the tunnel!

I have essentially finished my interviews and although I still need to go to group meetings every now and then, I don't have to spend my Sunday's going to 3 or 4 meetings, which as you can imagine takes up a full day leaving me with little spare time after work, writing, etc.

Currently off the check list:

Interviews (although it would be nice to get a couple more done and that may continue to happen on a sporatic basis as I sit in on random groups to continue my work for my thesis)

Theming my results

Interpretation (can you say hyper personal relationships!) Realistically this will probably continue but the majority of the work I believe is done

Still to do:

Continue with group meetings to stay "in" with the groups and not have to try to regain access

WRITING....oodles and oodles of writing, initially to get into the ECA conference and then hopefully get published later on this year!

Now I just need to get through presenting my research findings to my advisor and two faculty members that he works with from two different colleges. My advisor is a Computer Mediated Communication person who does work with Second Life, one of the other faculty members is a SL person as well and the final person deals with Computer Mediated Communication and social support. So, I will be presenting to people who actually know what they are talking about, which adds much more pressure than talking to people who have no clue what I'm talking about!

Wish me luck tonight!

And So It Goes...

I am currently well into my summer research and it is proving to be much more work than I had initially imagined. As many know, I am looking at why people use Second Life as a means of social support, so I am sitting in on support group meetings in Second Life. While by nature SL is hyper anonymous, getting accepted by a group has proven to be difficult in some respects. For example, before I started actually doing my research on a regular basis, I had sat in on some AA meetings. I asked the group leaders if it was okay for me to be there (which they said yes) and then asked the group. During this particular meeting I had one individual who IM'd me very upset that I was there. In another group I asked to be able to sit in and there was another individual who was uncomfortable with me there as well. I have sucessfully sat in on several groups recently and I may have found the formula to being accepted by the group...but only time will tell on that!

This doesn't mean that I haven't been able to get interviews however, I'm at around 15 people in, which is actually behind where I think really should be. Unfortunately the best time to get people is immediately after a group meeting and there are only so many meetings a week. So, I'm going to be content getting maybe 2 people a meeting. That seems to be a controllable number in terms of managing IM's and should keep me somewhat close to the final number of interviews I need (about 60-80). Of the people I have asked to interview, only one has declined saying they were busy. In fact most people seem to be very willing to answer my questions and tell me about their experiences.

Not only is the interviewing (and sitting in on groups which typically go for about an hour) time consuming, but there is also reading and writing to be done as well. While I had an idea that the project would take lots of time and energy, I didn't think it was going to take THIS much time and energy. My work schedule has changed and the number of hours I'm putting in at the day job has increased significantly (one day last week I left my house before 6am and didn't get back until after 7), and while that isn't a forever change, it is definitely making the whole research thing seem to go a little more slowly. While I know I will be able to get the project done by the end of the summer, the pressure lies in that I have two professors counting on me to write a decent paper that will be accepted to the Eastern Communication Association Conference as well as be published.

That is where the stress lies! How does one work a full time plus job, spend 12 hours a week driving, spend another 8 hours or so simply sitting in on support groups and then another who knows how many hours writing...And expect to have a decent result? And how do you explain to others the amount of stress that you are under without sounding whiny? I'm really the only person I know of in my boat!

And There Now Is A Plan

I've been pretty vocal of my love of Grad School. It makes me happy to spend time doing the readings and to write the papers. Things had been a bit up in the air since I was officially accepted into the program starting the fall of 2009. But now I have a plan.

I have been meeting with a professor about a paper that I was writing for another class about social support groups in second life. He had been giving me advice on how to do the research and some of the things I should be looking at. So, at my second meeting with him, and after I got my official acceptance letter, I asked him to be my thesis adviser. To which he said yes. So YEAH for me!! I'm incredibly excited. He specialized in Computer Mediated Communication, which is what I'm into as well. And he is into my research project. I sat down with him last week and set up my schedule and determined that I will actually go the communication route instead of mass communication, which is actually really good. I'd been going back and forth not sure which I should do and really just needed someone to tell me what to do.

With that said, the communication route is apparently more difficult and will be especially hard for me since I have no background in interpersonal communication. I went the pure journalism route for my BA. So, it's going to be a rough road, but I'm sure I can handle it....somehow. The best news...He wants me to do directed research over the summer and present at a conference in the fall, and then publish in the spring. Pretty sweet!! Oh, and he told me I should get my PhD....which I am actually considering doing. Who would have thought that someone who barely made it through their BA would be looking at getting a PhD....oh how life changes!!

It'sJust Like I Imagine Prison...Minus the Prison Sex

I am very familiar with standardized testing...I think I've taken nearly every possible test in my life minus the GRE's, which I took Saturday...well, sort of. But, GRE's aside for a minute, I want to talk about the testing facility.

I know they want to keep people honest, but really how much cheating can you do on these things...seriously?? I walk into the testing facility and handed over my ID and sign in. This I understand. But after that I have to go to another woman not three feet away who takes my picture (really? this is necessary?) and makes me not only sign a confidentiality statment but makes me write the statement out...IN CURSIVE no less. This is completely insane to me since anyone over the age of ten writes in a printing/cursive hybrid anyway. Then, I get escorted into another room (more like a hallway) that is no more than a foot away from the woman who just made me write a paragraph of useless information. This hallway is not just a room. I swear I had more security watching me than OJ. The back of the room is all glass and the paragraph lady has her desk on the other side of the glass. On the side of her desk is a TV with the picture cut into four with different angles of the hallway room. And then there was a microphone in there so every time someone coughed you could hear it via the microphone in the waiting room.

I ask you..is all that necessary? If I lie on my GRE's or cheat off of someone, won't I just fail out of school anyway? And what are you going to do with the picture of me? Will I show up on the internet somewhere on Jennifer Aniston's body (I give my full permission for this to happen by the way so if someone could make that happen it would be fabulous).

Oh...and after having everything short of a strip search, I don't even get to actually take all of the test...something about a "GRE Global Meltdown"....

***ahem ... Prison Riot?? ahem***

On the bright side, I came out with some pretty sweet new GRE tats....a bunch of vocab that I have no idea the definition of....

I'm Stumped...Seriously Stumped

It's true. I am. I'm overwhelmed almost to a crippling degree. I am in the mist of finals, which for me really just amounts to finishing up a paper I've written on organizational communication and socialization, which actually turned out alright. I'm happy enough with the topic I chose and think I could go farther with it if I decided to use it as a portion of my thesis if I decide to go that way. But just because its one paper doesn't mean that I'm lacking for things to do. I still have about four pages left to write on it and then I need to clean up the rest of what I previously wrote.

I am also in the mist of studying for my GRE's which is probably one of the more stressful things I've done. I've started studying for them but quite frankly it still stresses me out enormously. There is just SO much riding on this.

In addition, I need to decide which classes I want to take next semester. Now, here is my problem. I need to take a Mass Comm Theory class, but, it is only offered once every two years, and it was just offered this semester. So, it won't be offered again until the fall of 2010, which would mean that I would have a December graduation. This to me is unacceptable. I want to graduate in May!! So, I've found a class that is offered online through the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. I'm hoping that I can take that next fall and it will fit into my requirements and let me graduate on time (assuming of course that I'm accepted). But, this also creates another dilemma. Since I am a non degree student, I can only bring so many classes into the degree. I'm scheduled to take two classes next semester that I really want to take (future of news and health communication). If I take those two classes than I can't bring any more into the program when I swap to be a regular old grad student instead of a non degree one. So, either one of those classes won't count towards my degree of the Mass Comm Theory class won't. I'm trying to get it all figured out, but I don't want to take less than the two classes next semester because it will cause me to have to take too many classes next year while also doing thesis work and working full time. So many decisions!!

Work has been insane these last couple of weeks and is not looking at getting any less busy before Christmas, so I don't even have time to think there! I should be happy that I'm busy, and really I am, but everything all at once is just slightly overwhelming. It's hard coming home to homework and still having to think about what needs to be done at work as well.

Add in Christmas and I seriously want to scream. I still have to mail some presents and buy some other ones, and we're trying to cut down our Christmas list this year as well, so it is all very stressful. I have decided though that the Christmas cards just aren't going to happen this year. There is just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

The good thing?? Next weekend we're going to Quebec City. We'll probably only spend a night there, but it will give us both a little bit of a break, and quite frankly, I've been itching to go on a vacation for a while now. I usually can only make it 3 months or so before I'm ready to go and hit another country. I just get restless. So, this mini vaca will hold me over until the first of March when we'll go to Iceland.

Alright...I'm done whining...any advice??