Monday, July 26, 2010

Sorry it took so long to update this, but I was having apartment issues last week and was a bit busy. This week is the final week of the fellowship, which means my research is starting to wind down. I've finished with the poster, as you can see, and it looks quite nice, if I do say so myself.



The main thing I've been doing this summer, though, is writing drafts of chapters for my thesis. I have produced over 90 pages of writing in the past seven weeks alone (130 pages of content). I will admit that I am insanely proud of this, since it is the most I have written for any one project in my life. I'm sure that record will be broken by grad school, but for now, I'm pleased.

Anyway, the reason for telling you this is that my advisor has decided to have my write-ups copied and bound into a single volume, one for each of us. I must say that I also greatly enjoy the idea of having such a large amount of work bound, as it gives a sort of official flair to it. The down side is that I need to go through and correct every edit that the two of us came up with when reviewing these write-ups. Not that that's a terrible price to pay for getting them bound into a single volume; it's simply the plan for this week.

In addition to all of this, I've been looking at graduate schools and attempting to get the ball rolling on that. I've had three major choices for a while: University of Hawai'i, University of Washington, and Cornell. I've looked at other schools and they just don't seem to fit what I'm trying to do. Today, though, I looked at University College London (UCL) and found that it easily rivals Hawai'i for my top choice and possibly knocks Hawai'i down to second.

I was amazed, to say the least, because not only have I been set on Hawai'i for a good long while, but I have also looked at UCL about five or six times before today.

The difference? Usually I looked at the Anthropology department website, noted that they had cultural anthropology, and dismissed the school due to its lack of archaeology programs. Today, though, I did something I should have done months ago and actually looked to see if UCL had a separate Archaeology department. Turns out that they do, and while none of the archaeologists specialize in Southeast Asia, they do specialize in trade systems, glass, and beads. They've also had numerous people complete successful dissertations on glass and artifact analysis in Southeast Asia, so it's definitely possible to do Southeast Asian stuff there.

I'm not quite sure what to do with all of this yet, but will certainly keep everyone posted.

2 comments:

  1. Maybe it'll work this time--I've tried twice and had different mess-ups. Okay, The main thing is I think your poster is very, very good! What program did you use. I think you got a lot of information in there but it is still very organized.

    As far as archaeology--the English are still pretty good at that in which they don't "specialize!" I suppose I'd have to visit Europe then...

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  2. I used Microsoft Powerpoint, believe it or not. The poster is 36" x 48", and I've found that it's really easy to edit in powerpoint in terms of getting the maps, charts, etc.

    As far as England, there's no guarantee, and I've looked at both programs again and decided that Hawai'i is still top. UCL doesn't have a four-field approach (it's very "this is what you're doing, nothing else") and it might be harder to get a job back here if I have a degree from London.

    That being said, it is still a very, very good program, and should Hawai'i fail, I'm certainly not opposed to London. I think at this point, it's a very good second choice.

    BUt, if all goes well, you're either going to have to visit Europe or Hawai'i, which really aren't bad choices :)

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