In the past week I've had a lovely reminder of what 'life' is. The ANU had its annual 'o-week' last week, and I took most of the week off to enjoy myself and catch up with friends who had just returned to the ANU from summer holidays.
During o-week I also became involved in the ANU Disabilities Collective. Headed up by a friend of mine, the collective is aiming to increase the profile of those students with disabilities at the ANU and possibly increase the funding that goes toward them. We also want to have a nice social atmosphere so those with disabilities can feel more included in the life of the ANU.
While this doesn't compeltely relate to my honours project, I feel that it will be addition to my life this year. I'm really passionate about all the issues the collective wants to raise and it will be nice to do something hands on occasionally (as opposed to spending the whole year behind a computer screen).

Back on the subject of honours though - despite the break, I'm still making progress (yay!).
Yesterday saw me finishing off the first draft of my ethics proposal - which was a great relief. I'll be reviewing it today and meeting with Rod tommorrow to look over it. If all goes well and I'm happy with it I'll send it to the ethics comittee on Friday. Ideally, this means I may have ethics approval in just over a week (depending on the revisions they want me to make).

In anticipation of that (and because spending all day writing an ethics proposal made me both tired and sick of honours) I've started putting my survey into survey monkey - the online tool through which I'll disseminate my survey. Survey monkey is proving to be a great tool - though it has made me very aware of how complex my survey is. There's a lot of work behind getting a survey to look the way I want it to - particularly given that, depending on a participants' responses, I'll be getting them to take different 'paths' in the survey. This has meant a lot of fiddling with the 'logic' options in survey monkey - something which will take quite a while to perfect. All in all, I'm realising that survey design involves a lot more than just coming up with questions!

I'm also trying to make sure I keep thinking abou my literature review/writing the thing up. While I'm sure its to an extent inevitable, I don't relish the thought of spending the last couple of months of honours simply writing up the 20 000 word thesis. In order to combat this I'm trying to make myself write/brainstorm a little each day. I've had mixed success with this thusfar - I can't help but feel that I have other priorities (such as makign the survey work) now.

On that note, priorities have to be one of the most interesting psychological aspects of this project. While I'm getting guidance from Rod, I'm largely left on my own to decide how my days/weeks are spent. I've (thankfully) fallen into the habit of coming into CPAS to do work - which has meant that once I achieve my goals for the day I can go home and forget about being an honours student. However, my inherent perfectionism has already made this a bit hard. I'm basically trying to work until I can't stand being here (or I've grossly overachieved on my targets) and then going home and refreshing myself for the next day. This capacity will vary throughout the year - but I'm hoping it works as a strategy.

Overall - life continues to be rather wonderful. While the target of 20 000 words and a first class still seems a world away - I'm taking, and achieving solidly, nice lovely baby steps and with any luck I'll continue that way.

Next time you hear from me I'll (hopefully) have submitted ethics and have more of a survey to chat to you about.