Well, well. What have we here?

I see my last post was early November of last year. Considerable changes have taken place since then. I submitted a "clean" version of the rough-draft of my methodology to my mentor. And what did he do? He sent it on to the committee as if it were the whole pre-proposal! Of course, one of the committee members picked up on this and wanted to know where the problem statement was with which to align the methodology in order to properly evaluate it. Which is what he sent back to me. At that point, I'd had enough. I mentioned my frustration to another researcher who suggested maybe I should contact my adviser about another mentor. My adviser suggested I contact the person I was interested in as a new mentor. I contacted her and she asked me to contact the department chair, who was going to have to approve a change anyway, and ask for a new mentor. I wrote her, and she came back with another name. Long story short, I have a new mentor. We've communicated a few times, mostly by email, but I've already gotten good direction, and submitted a new copy of the pre-proposal with the latest adjustments.

Here's where I'm headed: I'm planning on doing a time-sequenced experimental design where I take the metrics from internal and external review comments. Then, using the ISO:9000 2008 registration date of December 21, 2009 as the point of intervention, I'm going to compare data from the two years prior to registration with the one after for each of the review sets. Each will be compared to itself over the three years using ANOVA. Then, each will be compared to the other using a chi-square correlation coefficient.

So far, I'm not getting positive feedback (as in, "Yes, go ahead. Do it!") but I'm not getting negative feedback either. I guess I would categorize it as encouraging neutral feedback. We'll see what happens this week.

I also had to request a second extension this last week as my first one ran out on Wednesday. This was a little hairy, as I didn't get notice from the university until the Friday before and I was on vacation in Myrtle Beach SC. I couldn't get in touch with anyone to get the information I needed to fill out the request form until Monday, the day we were supposed to return to Jacksonville NC. On Monday, it started snowing and we ended up only making it as far as Wilmington NC. I was freaking out! But I was able, using my laptop and cell phone, to talk to an adviser and get the information I needed. I submitted the request 2 days before the expiration, but they gave me the turnaround I needed and approved the extension in time. I'm going to contact my regular adviser and recommend they send out notice 30 days and 7-10 days in advance instead of the 5 days I received.

So, that is where the saga is at now. Let's see how this epic continues this week.