Five days.
I'll admit, I'm getting pretty nervous - and a bit panicky over being behind schedule on my prep. There was so much that I wanted to do before the defence, but now I face a tough choice: trim my prep list and concentrate on the important stuff (and just have faith that I can handle everything else cold on the fly during Q&A), or try to do everything, which comes with the risk of burning out and/or not doing the key stuff in enough depth to really knock those questions out of the park.
Well, there is a handful of things that I know my committee will ask - about one or two things per member, except the external (who I really can't sleuth out all that well at the moment, until I do some more skimming of his publications). Those seem like essential things.
Some last-minute prep:
- Re-read dissertation
- Time, trim, practice, memorize and make outline speech notes for lecture
- Practice some talking points
- Prep Q&A for liberalism
- Prep Q&A for Frederick Barth and ethnicity/identity issues
- Prep Q&A on gender/assimilation issues (Prell and Hyman)
- Prep Q&A on Bowling Alone and Robert Bellah
- Prep Q&A on communitarianism (Etiznioni and Sandel) and authenticity (Trilling)
- Look at dissertation proposal for the first time since 2007
- Finish quick-points notebook
- Make firm definitions for my key terms for Q&A
- Review a few more key films
- Review Taylor and Walzer
- Review comp materials for possible Q&A issues
And do some laundry and get groceries/do banking sometime in there, work on the Pittsburgh app, and see about rescheduling the mock defence (so, add cleaning to the list) ... oh, and celebrate my birthday. oy.
Those things should basically cover the bare necessities - but I really need to make the most of my time, as there is so many other small things I'd like to do before Thursday night (i.e. Jewish/Christian relations Q&A, definition of "Who is a Jew?", etc, just in case these things come up), so I can get a good sleep that night knowing I am prepared.
The last thing I need is the feeling that I neglected a lot of important stuff.
yikes.
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