Yep! Work on my thesis for school has begun. Thanks to my faulty memory, I can recall writing only one research paper prior to this one. I probably remember that paper because it was traumatic for everyone involved, including my parents. I nearly dropped out of college over it, or maybe I did drop out of college over it. Who can remember? It was on the causes of homosexuality, a topic of interest to me at the time.
This one is about spiritual care as an essential aspect of palliative care, a topic of interest to me now. You don’t have to read it—if you read this blog, you are reading it. It’s not a research paper per se, but an ethnography, largely based on my experiences at County Hospital and at my paying job. However, there will also be academic sections drawn from pertinent papers and books.
Fortunately, I happened to encounter one of the students from the cohort prior to mine on the plane when I went to school in March, and she mentioned that she had used Word’s template for an APA style paper for her thesis (File—New from Template—APA Style Paper). This has already made my life a lot easier, and is going to save me a zillion hours.
I am allocating one day a week to work on this. The first day, I found myself immediately stuck trying to write the abstract, but then I found something online that said to write the abstract last, not first. I decided to just start writing up the notes I have taken, a task about which I feel confident, and by the end of the day, I had 13 pages out of 60 (excluding reference list and appendices) written. By chance, I had a telephone meeting with my mentor that day, our second in a year. She applauded my going ahead with what seemed obvious to do, and she advised me not to let myself feel stuck for too long—I can get help from her, or my mentor group, or the wonderful woman who is in charge of helping my entire cohort with our papers.
On my second day of working on my paper, I decided to make at least one citation and corresponding entry in the references list, and I compiled information on citing books, articles, websites, and personal communications. Some of these people who write about this stuff online are quite droll.
I did succeed in making one citation and matching reference, and then I got back to doing the fun part. At the end of the day, I had 30 pages written, which meant it was going extremely well or that I was doing something extremely wrong.
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