The beginning of a new year

I’m in the middle of my sixth year as a graduate student.  Six years!  That’s too long. Granted, two of those years were spent working on my MS degree, but still.  I have a 10 month old daughter and a guaranteed job upon graduation.  I need to graduate.  I need to focus.

My institution has a three paper dissertation option, which means I need to have three articles accepted to a peer-reviewed journal.  I failed my comprehensive exams–which is a whole other story–and as a result, was required by my committee to write a comprehensive review paper on my field of study.  I just turned it in to my committee for their review and hopefully will submit it for publication later this year.  Another consequence of failing my comprehensive exams is that my committee required me to change my dissertation topic.  I thought that a year and half of laboratory work was thrown away, but it turns out that a year-long experiment might be publishable after all.  That means I only have one paper left.  My goal is to finish all laboratory work by the end of the semester, do computer modeling over the summer, and start writing my final paper by the end of the year.