Friday, May 13, 2011

Today I pretty much worked on my paper the entire day. It was more about quality that quantity but I will be back at it on Saturday (tomorrow). I was able to finally transpose my notes from my last 2 interviews with Professor Moore of UT and Andrea Barefield of Lone Star College in Houston. Both were full of insights and spawned connections that I reached out to today to setup interviews. Saturday I will visit the dissertation circle and input my plans for this semester which will include conducting my proposal. The rest of the day I will get back to reading and summarizing.

Monday, May 02, 2011

I did not make my goal of submitting my first draft of my chapter 2 by May 1. For the past 2 weeks I have been preparing for multiple job interviews. This was all consuming. Although I did not get any work done with regards to the actual literature review, I did meet with several people to gain insights to what the issues may be around my topic. Margaret suggested that I do this. Some of the meetings have been a gold mine.

For example, the information that I gathered from my interview with Mario Berry will be very helpful when I am designing my interview questions. I will post my notes from that conversation on Google Docs. I also made contact with IT leaders, thanks to Wayne Hicks, in BDPA. My aim is to interview these leaders in August at the BDPA National Technology Conference.

I have their contact information and I intend to connect with them this week. I have also tried to reach out repeatedly to Richard Tapia of Rice University to no avail. Additionally, I reached out to Carmen Caldwell and Omari Gordon. These are contacts I made via my conversation with high school teacher Krystal Gordon. I left messages for both and I am looking forward to speaking with them.

I attended a job fair on April 20th. The idea was to sit down with those who are doing the hiring. I met Boi-Yeanoh Adams. I interviewed her as well and she connected with me Dr. Consuelo Waight of The University of Houston. Both meeting were fruitful. I have setup other interviews from contacts I made at the job fair. On Tuesday I am meeting with Andrea Barefield of Lone Star College. I am looking forward to getting her thoughts as well as connect one of her colleagues that she mentioned would be helpful in my quest.