Time flies...dissertationversary!

XKCD 1403

It's hard to believe, but five years have passed since the successful defense of my dissertation.  Where does the time go? My defense was on July 7, my final accepted manuscript was published on August 11th. I guess that's my pubaversary? 🤔 The degree was ultimately conferred in October, given university timelines, so I guess I also have a degreeaversy coming up😂.  Anyway, I count July as being the definitive date for degree completion because all the rest is really administrativia.  This only means one thing: I can now delete my scratch files, notebooks, recodings, transcripts, notes, and other raw research data collected from this research.  

Athabasca (at the time, at least) required that we keep our data for five years after conferral of the degree. That seemed fair enough. I guess if someone wanted to verify what I did for some reason, they had time to do so within these five years (I suspect that this is the reason for data retention).  In speaking to other doctoral students at my institution, it seems like the data retention period is only one year post-conferral. From a higher education administration perspective, I would love to know the decisions and rationales that went into crafting these retention policies.

Looking back at my studies, I really enjoyed my courses with Pat Fahy, George Siemens (where is George now???), and Debra Hoven - who I met at an  AAEEBL (Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning) conference in Boston back when they were co-located with the Campus Technology conference (RIP Campus Tech - it was fun to attend each summer in Boston).  I also had a great working relationship with my two dissertation co-chairs, Aga Palalas and Cynthia  Blodgett-Griffin. I really missed the opportunity to study with Terry Anderson and Mohammed Ally, but I guess we can't have it all.

One of the things that I've come back to during these past few years is the dissertation as assessment.  Prior to starting my doctoral journey, most of the things I heard about the dissertation process were that this would be my biggest work, and that I should structure it to be able to pull out chapters for publication after the fact. I suppose that it was my biggest work to date, but it's by no means my biggest work.  I've had other things written, published, and cited more than my dissertation; things that were written before I started working on a dissertation. I guess, if you're reading this and you're working on collaboration-related things, cite my dissertation 😂. I also didn't find the particular advice of writing a dissertation in a way so that it could lend itself to pulling pieces out later, polishing, and submitting to journals for publication.  I guess my dissertation topic and process didn't lend themselves to that, but at the same time I don't care that it wasn't compatible with that framework. I approached my dissertation as another kind of assessment.  It was a fun kind of assessment in that it was relevant to my interests, and it was authentic in that manner. It was, nevertheless, in my mind, an assessment of my capabilities as a researcher.  This has made me ponder what personas doctoral students/candidates adopt when they are pursuing this kind of academic work. Do they see themselves as students? researchers? mentees? emerging scholars? some/all of the above? Something else? And, how does this self-conception during their dissertation days impact what they do and how they do it?