One year to go...

When we moved to Tennessee in August 2012, I have had several moments where I thought May 2014 would never arrive. After I turn in a survey proposal on Monday, I will be officially finished with my coursework toward my dissertation. How on earth did I make it through 4 long semesters and a summer that included 16 courses, 6 of which were research based?

Yesterday morning I had my dissertation pre-proposal meeting with my dissertation committee. It is pretty crazy to think I will be graduating with a Ph.D. in a year-May 7, 2015 to be exact. Don't get me wrong, I still have a long road ahead of me the next year to complete my comprehensive exams, officially propose my research topic, collect data and write my dissertation, but this spring the light at the end of the tunnel got a little brighter and it continues to shine and guide me to the end of this intense 3 year process (most other Ph.D. programs are 4-5+ years, so 3 is really fast).

In 2 weeks I start my comprehensive exams that I must "pass" to become a doctoral candidate and will then be "ABD" or "all but dissertation". Everyone tells me how lucky I am to have the exams I do. I receive 4 questions over the summer and I have 3 weeks to answer each question. By the time the summer is over and I have answered all 4 questions, I should roughly have chapters 1-3 of my dissertation complete. My friends tell me I am lucky because many of them have their comprehensive exam over a 6 hour period with not notes, books, internet, etc and must answer their questions. And, it is not necessarily related to their dissertation topic. What?! So, I feel lucky and glad my process is going to help me in the long run.

My research will be over motivations that influence travel to college sporting events, particularly college football games. While this type of research has been done in the past, I am going to look at an area that has very little, if any, research published: those that travel to the games with a RV. This is a unique population as they do not spend money in the community in the same way your traditional fan does and the community will need to market to these individual differently as well.

So if the posts on this blog continue to be really sporadic, it is because I will be practically living in the library to answer my exam questions over the next 12 weeks.