I needed to look up some dates in the academic calendar, and as I jotted things down, I realized:

• Graduation is 33 weeks away!!
  • That’s less than 8 months … or 234 days, but counting by weeks sounds quicker. 🙂
• Just as exciting, I will have my defense completed within 25 weeks!!
  • That’s when you can officially be called “Dr.” Woohoo!
  • That’s only 6 months from now! Squeeeee!

Things here are trucking along. I’m about 14 pages into my literature review (chapter 2) and hope to have a good draft to send to my chair by next week. There is a really fantastic Firefox add-in tool called Zotero that I am falling in love with, though I’m still learning how to use it. It’s kind of like a digital filing cabinet for your references, and you can drag & drop citations into various categories to keep them organized. Better yet, you don’t even have to write down the citation. Zotero recognizes it from the web page (say, an article that you are reading through the e-library) and imports the pertinent information into your citation.

Then, as you are writing the paper, you can click and add references directly into the paper, and it will format them according to the style you’ve selected. The only downside is that the style my department uses (APSA) is not one of the choices. Zotero does have Chicago style, though, and that’s pretty similar. The even better part is that you can change the style whenever you want, and it’ll adjust the whole paper. So, when I have to submit the final version after my defense to the Graduate School (which requires a different style, of course), it won’t be such a huge endeavor to make the changes.

…

I’m still wrapping my head around the six-month realization. I am so excited!!!!