Dissertating 12

It's two weeks delayed, but my first dissertation proposal draft is now in the offing.

The way this works sounds odd, but makes sense in practice: usually, the PhD candidate has a mostly workable paper already before even "proposing" it as his/her dissertation. Sure, some (extraordinary) people can get away with proposing an idea from scratch, but us mere mortals typically need loads of preparation long before a proposal is made, which upon approval and more work becomes a dissertation draft, which upon acceptance gets them through grad school.

So the past month's been spent programming and doing a write up of the econometric results. It's much more fleshed out than either the concept paper I'd prepared previously or my "Draft Zero" that in retrospect was overly ambitious, but I hope to get some feedback from my adviser soon so I know exactly how to move forward from here. Once I do, I'll probably post the draft and some of the other work so far somewhere here. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Did I mention I intend to submit this for consideration at a remittance conference being organized by the Philippine Central Bank next year? Yeah, so much for not getting ahead of myself...