Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Now, the dissertation

The University of Toronto Department of Political Science website lists the requirements for completing a PhD:

  • Field 1 (Canadian Politics: 2012-13)
  • Field 2 (Public Policy: 2013-14)
  • Qualitative Methods Requirement (2014)
  • Quantitative Methods Requirement (waived from undergrad and Oxford MPhil coursework)
  • Field Examination in Field 1 and Field 2 (February 2014 and January 2016)
  • Thesis Committee (August 22nd, 2017)
  • Thesis Proposal (August 29th, 2017)
  • Language Requirement (waived from undergrad coursework and Summer Language Bursary Program)
  • Ethics Review
  • Candidacy Completion
  • Dissertation

It hasn’t exactly followed the ideal schedule, but I have done quite a few other things at the same time.

The aim now is to get ethical approval by October and finish writing and defending the dissertation by September 2019.

Learning and teaching

Thesis proposal reading continues to dominate my information diet, but I bought a couple of unrelated books today.

Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s Napoleon’s Buttons — recommended by my friend Myshka — describes the influence of seventeen molecules on human history. I’m about 60 pages in and have been finding it entertaining and reminiscent of James Burke’s Connections television series (he also talks a lot about coal tar and the rise of synthetic chemistry) and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.

I also got Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism, which was recently reviewed in The Economist.

Term time is rapidly approaching. In addition to my PhD research, I will be working as a teaching assistant for a second year “U.S. Government and Politics” course, which I did previously in 2013/14. I also applied for TA jobs in “Introduction to Peace, Conflict and Justice”, “Quantitative Reasoning”, and the “Canada in Comparative Perspective” course I have helped teach three times already. I’m done with coursework and comprehensive exams, so a double TA load should be manageable. It’s pretty important given that I haven’t had a paycheque since the spring, and my funding package as a sixth-year student is cut in half.

Expletives do not suffice

In one of my most boneheaded moves ever, I lost my wonderful Fuji X100s camera at the Canadian Political Science Association conference.

I was at a morning panel on “Natural Resources, Energy, and Climate” and because the desks were small I put it on the one behind me. At the end of the session, I walked to my next event, sat down, realized I didn’t have the camera, and rushed immediately back to find it gone.

I checked both the Ryerson and Congress lost and found locations and asked all the nearby staff members. I also emailed everyone on the panel, in case one of them picked it up.

The camera’s serial number is 33A04584 and it is clearly labeled in two places with my name and email address. Perhaps someone picked it up and has yet to contact me.

It’s an extremely painful thing to lose: worth about four months of my rent or well over a quarter of a year’s tuition. Over 4,000 photos I’ve taken with it since I got it in November 2013 are on Flickr.

[Update: 7:30pm] In a hugely relieving development, one of my fellow audience members — recently appointed to a tenure-track job at uVic — saw the abandoned camera, picked it up, and has now restored it to me.